Product: Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 TurboX
Manufacturer: HIS technology
SKU code: H485QX512P
Information: HIS website
Street price: $199
HIS Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 TurboXIt is rare in the history of the graphics card industry, that a manufacturer introduces that all new pro-active gaming device, and then procedes to have so much success. The strategy behind the Radeon 4800 series is simple, high performance, at a fair price. I mean face it, you drop 175-199 USD and bam... you receive a card allowing you to play the very latest games at a good screen resolution and great image quality.
For the manufacturers, a little bit of a downside is to be able to do such a thing at a very affordable price, you need to cut away stuff and save money to offer the product as cheap as possible. On the Radeon HD 4850 the problem is very clear, it can get really hot, and it could be a bit more silent yet the biggest downside, thanks to it's cooling, is that the residual heat is dumped inside the PC.
Luckily for us there are always a couple of manufacturers out there who are willing to do things slightly different. HIS technology always has been such a company. Surely they'll sell the regular versions just as well, yet typically a month after the original reference products are unleashed onto the market, HIS comes up with a slightly customized design. Those intrested in the industry all know about the ICEQ concept, that dual-slot cooler based series of graphics cards from which we tested so much in the past already.
It was therefore no surprise to see HIS launch the Radeon HD 4850 512MB with a customized cooler, the new ICEQ4 model. Again very silent, again very good cooling performance and again, great looks. Next to that HIS decided to overclock the card a bit for you as well. Suffice to say, how can it not be a winner ?
As you guys know by now ATI's Radeon HD 4850/4870 are both using the same GPU (graphics processor unit). The codename for these chips is RV770. AMD put nearly a billion transistors into that GPU, which is now built upon a 55-nm (260 mm2 Die size) production. The chip literally is 16 mm wide and high. Which for AMD still is quite large, for a 55nm product. The number of transistors for a midrange product like this is extreme and typically it's best to directly relate that to the number of shader processors to get a better understanding. But first let's look at some nice examples of Die sizes of current architectures.
The Radeon 4850/4870 series graphics processor have 800 scalar processors (320 on the HD 3800 series) and now have a significant forty texture units (was 16 in last-gen architecture). The stream/compute/shader processors (can we please just name them all shader processors?) definitely had a good number of changes; if you are into this geek talk, you'll spot 10 SIMD clusters each carrying 80 32-bit Shader processors (this accumulates to 800). If I remember correctly, one SIMD unit can handle double precision.
Much like we recently noticed in the NVIDIA GTX 200 architecture, the 80 scalar stream processors per SIMD unit have 16KB of local data cache/buffer that is shared among the shader processors. Next to the hefty shader processor increase you probably already notice the massive amount of texture units. In the last generation product we noticed 16 units, the 4800 series has 40 units.
When you do some quick math, that's 2.5x the number of shader processors over the last-gen product, and 2.5x the number of texture units. That's a pretty grand change folks. Since the GPU has 800 shader processors it can produce the raw power of 1000 to 1200 GFlops in simple precision. It's a bit lame and inaccurate to do but divide the number of ATI's scalar shader processors with the number 5 and you'll roughly equal the performance to NVIDIA's stream processor. You could (in an abstract way) say that the 4800 series have 160 Shader units, if that helps you compare it towards NVIDIA's scaling. Again there's nothing scientific or objective about that explanation.
Effectively combined with the clock speed and memory this product can poop out 1000/1200 GigaFLOPs of performance. Depending on how that is measured of course. But still, with an entry product at 199 USD for the 4850 and 299 USD for the 4870 that's just an awful lot of computing power.
Next to internal efficiency improvements we also stumble into an updated UVD engine (HD video decoder/accelerator/enhancer).
HIS submitted their Radeon HD 4850 with some customizations. The UV reflective dual-slot ICEQ4 cooler is obviously present, and next to that this is the TurboX version, which boils down to the fact that the card is overclocked for you. Normally the Radeon HD 4850 would have a 625 MHz core and shader frequency, this model is clocked at 675 at standard for you. next to that you'll also gain some extra memory bandwidth as the GDDR3 clock is set at 2200 MHz, which is 200 MHz higher than the reference clock. Not at all dramatic higher clocks bit every tiny little bit surely helps.
When we look at the PCB of the card, we immediately spot that the layout is different, this is a customized blue colored PCB, hopefully that will yield some good overclocking results as well.
You can expect roughly a 110-120 Watt peak watt power consumption. At a 199 USD introduction price, we expect this to be a very competitive product on the market. Last thing I need to mention, included in the box are:
Bundled we see the following:
* DVI to VGA Dongle x 1
* DVI to HDMI Dongle x 1
* S-Video to Composite adapter
* Crossfire™ bridge x 1
* Manual
* Driver CD
* Multi-purpose magnetic screwdriver with LED.
Multi-purpose magnetic screwdriver with LED included in the bundle
The bundle is okay. No additional software in the form of full games though. You do get a small gadget, see the photo above; the new included multi-purpose screwdriver it's funny and handy.
Installation
Its the standard anno 2008. Graphics cards are pretty easy to install. This card was no different. Slide the card into a free PCIe 8x / 16x slot and connect a monitor. Connect the 6-pin PCIe power cable. You can now power up the PC. Once Windows boots up, install the latest Catalyst drivers and make sure your operating system is fully patched up, especially DirectX. After driver installation, reboot the PC and you are ready to go.
Power consumption
It's time to do some actual testing with these cards. We'll start off by showing you some tests we have done on overall power consumption
of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is really good with the new 55nm products. Our single card test system is a Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz) Processor, the nForce 680i SLI mainboard, a passive water-cooling solution on the CPU, 2GB memory, DVD-ROM and WD Raptor drive. Have a look:
Videocard
A single Radeon HD 4850/4870 series requires you to have a 450-500 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system, and I think that's barely on the safe side. Also recommended is 32 AMP's on the 12 volts rails for stable power distribution (in a single card configuration).
Crossfire is something else, you add another 130-150 Watts plus 8 AMPs on the 12V rails during gaming. I recommend a PSU of, at the very least, 750-800 Watts. Make sure you have some reserves folks. It's not that your PC will consume that much power, it's just that you want to make sure your PSU can deal with the hefty load and will stay stable during you entire gaming experience.
With three cards obviously 800+ Watt power supplies are recommended, and in fact even needed to be able to even supply something as simple as enough PCIe graphics power connectors.
There are many good PSU's available, over the years we reviewed a lot of them and have loads of recommended PSU's for you to check out in there, have a look. Things that can happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:
* bad 3D performance
* crashing games
* spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
* freezes during gameplay
* PSU overload can cause it to break down
The thermal envelope
We measure at a room temperature of 21-22 Degrees C, look at idle temperature and then load the GPU 100% for a couple of minutes and measure the temperature once a second and follow the temperature delta.
Typically the standard Radeon 4850 products come with a bit of an average cooler. Temperatures can rise up-to 95 Degrees C on these products. So I was quite thrilled to see a much better cooling solution mounted to this product.
Idle temps are roughly 45 Degrees C, yet when the GPU is fully utilized we measured 65 Degrees C, which is far better than the reference cooler. Also bare in mind that this product is pre-overclocked, typically that results into a slightly higher GPU temperature. But yeah, lovely.
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card
When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, that heat usually needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try-out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective, you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.
We start up a benchmark and leave it running for a while. The fan rotational speed remains constant. We take the dBA meter, move away 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card.
With the ICEQ4 cooler you can expect roughly 40-41 dBa at peak GPU usage (fan RPM will be higher when GPU is hotter).
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