Thursday, 28 August 2008. 00:47 GMT
ATI Radeon HD4850 Crossfire Performance
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 ATI Radeon HD4850 Crossfire Performance
Category  Hardware 
 Graphics Card
Requirements  Radeon HD4850 x 2
 Catalyst v8.6 
Type  Performance Test
Rating  Easy
Editor  Winston Chim 
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" ... you can increase your gaming performance dramatically ... just by adding another Radeon HD4850 and Crossfire them together, with no complicated procedures. "

 

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Crossfire 2 x Radeon HD4850. It's the cheapest way to boost your graphics performance

 

Introduction

Last year we published an unforgetable article on how to Crossfire 2 Radeon HD38xx cards of different brands and different clock speeds. It worked great, though there were some glitches on some games with the Catalyst v8.4 drivers. Nevertheless, it proved that it can be done ... producing amazing results and giving gamers a massive boost in performance. This week, I want to show you what the performance is like with 2 x Radeon HD4850 in Crossfire configuration.

Firstly, we managed to get hold of 2 Radeon HD4850s ... one from MSI and one from Sapphire. Both cards are based on AMD/ATI's reference design, so the cards should be very similar, if not identical.

 

Crossfire HD4850

 

Then, we downloaded ATi's latest Catalyst v8.6 drivers. You can download these drivers ... HERE (Vista 32-bit). We tested the 2 Radeon HD4850 in Crossfire configuration using the following setup listed below. I installed two totally different graphic cards from different manufacturers ... a MSI R4850-T2D512 and a Sapphire Radeon HD4850. I then linked the 2 cards together using 2 Crossfire ribbon cables, which was included in the packaging.

 

Test Setup (Socket-AM2+)
 Motherboard  Gigabyte GA-X48 DQ6
 CPU Default

 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 

 
 Overclocked  N/A  
 Ram  OCZ DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 2Gb Kit   
 Video Card  MSI R4850-T2D512 DDR3
 Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512Mb DDR3
 
 Crossfire Mode  N/A  
 Video Drivers  Catalyst v8.6  
 Chipset Drivers  AMD chipset drivers from CD  
 Hard Drive  Western Digital Caviar 250Gb (16Mb cache)  
 CD/DVD ROM  Pioneer DVD-RW/DL Rom drive  
 Cooling  OCZ Vendetta CPU Cooler  
 Sound Card  Onboard HD Audio  
 PSU  PC Power & Cooling 860W PSU   
 LAN  Onboard Gigabit Ethernet  
 CRT Monitor  19" Dell P990 Ultrascan  
 LCD Monitor  19" Samsung 940BF TFT Monitor  
 OS  Windows Vista with native DX10 support

 

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS defaults. ALL settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was automatically set to DDR2-1066 with the memory timings at AUTO. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using the OCZ DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 2Gb kit.

Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our operating system. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1600x1200 with high detail turned on (x4 AA and x16 AF).

 



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