System setup
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 TOXIC EDITION 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MiB | BFG GeForce 9800 GTX 512MiB | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MiB | XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current pricing, including VAT | £175* | £149 | £125 | £175 | £129 | £139** |
£210 |
| Shader model | 4.1 | 4.0 | |||||
| Stream processors | 800 | 128 | 192 | ||||
| GPU clock speed (MHz) | 750 | 675 | 625 | 750 | 675 | 738 | 576 |
| Shader clock speed (MHz) | 750 | 675 | 625 | 750 | 1,688 | 1,836 | 1,242 |
| Memory clock speed (MHz) | 3,600 | 2,200 | 1,986 | 3,600 | 2,200 | 2,200 | 2,000 |
| Memory bus width (Bits) | 256 | 448 | |||||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 LGA775 (3.0GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, quad-core) | ||||||
| Motherboard | MSI X48 Platinum (X48+ICH9R) | eVGA NF68 (nForce 680i SLI) | |||||
| Motherboard BIOS | P2B2 | P31 | |||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.4.0.1016 | NVIDIA device driver 15.08 | |||||
| Memory | 4GiB (2x 2GiB) DDR3-1066 | 4GiB (2x 2GiB) DDR2-1066 | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 7-7-7-20 2T @ 1066MHz | 5-5-5-15 2T @ 1066MHz | |||||
| PSU | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | Gigabyte ODIN GT 800W | |||||
| Monitor | Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600px | ||||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GiB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||||||
| Graphics driver | Catalyst 8.7 | Catalyst 8.6 R5 | Catalyst 8.6 R4 | ForceWare 174.74 | ForceWare 175.19 | ForceWare 177.34 | |
| Operating system | Windows Vista Business, 64-bit | ||||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks | Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
v2.103: DX9 - very
high quality Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.2 (demo_00010.dem, map Valley): OpenGL - vhq Lost Planet: Extreme Condition v1.004 built-in benchmark: DX10 - high quality Crysis v1.2.1 custom-recorded benchmark: DX10 - high quality |
|---|
Notes
* we couldn't find any UK retailer stocking the card. We're using the £175 figure that most reference HD 4870s are selling for.** the pricing we expect most 'plus' cars to ship at. Volume stock expected shortly.
We've pulled in reference-clocked Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards using Catalyst 8.6 drivers for performance-comparison purposes, as well as Sapphire's pre-overclocked HD 4850 TOXIC card.
Providing the competition from NVIDIA are three SKUs. The GeForce 9800 GTX has seen a slashing of its online pricing, in direct response to the introduction of the two new AMD SKUs, and can be found on in-stock for around £129. NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ is slowly creeping into the channel for around £150, but this should drop to around £139 soon enough.
With no absolutely direct competitor at the £175 price point, the third NVIDIA comparison is the stock-clocked GeForce GTX 260 from XFX, which come in at just over £200.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1,680x1050, 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600 with decent image-quality settings as well. However, we've omitted the 2,560x1600 results for Crysis and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition running in high-quality modes because they produced what we consider to be non-playable frame-rates.
