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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Thursday, June 26, 2008
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Having been already impressed by the HD 4870, it was time to head down to IBuyPower Australia to strap not one, not two but three of these bad boys into the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution. Moving from two cards upwards on the HD 4850 caused some problems, but we're hoping that the HD 4870 doesn't have the same issues. Since we've already looked at the Sapphire HD 4870 in a fair bit of detail, we're just going to have a look at some pictures of the test system before we get stuck into the results. So, with everything said and done, let's get stuck into it and see what happens when we put three of these cards together.
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Frankly speaking, considering test results of Phenom X4 9850, we were not keen to test a lower-clocked Phenom X3 8750 with fewer cores. However, our initial negative thinking served the good turn, because we were not disappointed. On the contrary, we decided that some people may seriously like this curiosity.
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Although its always nice to occupy the highest performance position, AMD knows very well that the mainstream sector is what sells a lot more. They surprised everyone with their 3850 card last year which performed decently for a mainstream product. Today, they're shaking the foundation one more time with the launch of the mid-ranged 4850 graphics card.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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Today sees the official launch of the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics cards. We disseminate the technology and evaluate just how hard they punch NVIDIA in the gut.
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Last week, due to some unexpected circumstances, we were able to post a sneak peek of the RV770 GPU and ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. As our limited testing showed, the Radeon HD 4850 was quite promising for a $199 graphics card. But we weren't able to tell the complete story. While the initial benchmarks definitely looked good, there was a lot more to talk about in regard to the Radeon HD 4850 and the RV770 GPU at the heart of the card. Today we can finally spill the rest of the beans. You see, AMD didn't plan to officially announce just one new Radeon HD 4800 series card this week, but two, with a dash of information about a third thrown in for good measure. Today marks the official arrival of not only the Radeon HD 4850, but the higher-end Radeon HD 4870 as well. As we've already explained, one card - the Radeon HD 4850 - is targeted at the sub-$200 price point. The other, however, is a $299 screamer that makes use of some cutting edge technology, like GDDR5 memory. Come on by the site and check them out...
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Monday, June 23, 2008
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The guys down at IBuyPower Australia can't get rid of me these days. I'm surprised they haven't started asking me to pay rent. The other day the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution board arrived, and this thing just absolutely won me over as far as looks and features went. However, the feature that we really care about today is the fact it has four PCI Express x16 slots. While ASUS use a x16/x16/x4/x4 configuration, it's really one of the best on the market. So, with four HD 4850s in hand and hopefully a driver that was going to work, it was time to take four of these single slot bad boys to town.
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Friday, June 20, 2008
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The past 24 hours has been nothing but a blur of testing, but we wanted to get this review out to you as soon as possible. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ raise the bar for graphics cards and perform better than one would expect for a $199-$229 product. Enthusiasts and gamers better start saving some money up because you'll want one of these before summer is over....
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The retail card that we have is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850, which features an MSRP of $199 and will be the jewel in the price versus performance charts for months to come. It is also the first card that has a TeraFLOP of compute power. Not bad at all for a price tag of just $199!
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Thursday, June 19, 2008
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Not officially released yet but available to buy, we take a brief look at Radeon HD 4800-series.
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Back to IBuyPower Australia we go. We have intentions of letting the HD 4850s really shine in the 4GHz Q9650 beast that we're becoming quite accustomed to using. Later today we will be posting our Sapphire HD 4850 review from our own testbed. For that reason we won't be going into details on the cards here. What we will do is have a quick look the setup and get straight into these benchmarks. What AMD has on its side is the fact that Intel boards are Crossfire compatible, and what enthusiast doesn't have an Intel CPU with a supporting Intel chipset? - While the 700i series of chipsets from NVIDIA are popular, they have nowhere near the market share of Intel. Thanks to the price and the ease of setup, anyone can really get on the Crossfire wagon.
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Friday, June 13, 2008
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In the previous article devoted to benchmarking an engineering sample of a quad-core AMD Phenom we failed to "cross all t's," because this processor has a bug officially acknowledged by AMD. Now we have an AMD Phenom X4 9850 of B3 stepping, in which this bug is fixed. Since it's the fastest CPU from AMD for now, it will be interesting to compare it to Intel processors.
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Monday, May 26, 2008
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The AMD Phenom X2 was announced quite some time ago but still hasn't seen the light of day; instead we were greeted by the X3 Phenom, a new breed of processor, first in the market to offer a Triplecore solution. This CPU is priced lower than AMD's own X4 and Intel Core 2 Duo series. In our review today we test the Phenom X3 8450 and compare it to an AMD X4 and Intel C2D.
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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We've published a great deal of benchmarks looking at the Linux "fglrx" driver (now more commonly referred to as the Linux Catalyst driver) since these major changes were pushed into the limelight this past fall. In fact, since this past September we've published more than 80 display driver articles with many of them being AMD related, and that's in addition to nearly a dozen graphics card reviews. On the AMD side, all of our testing has been done with the consumer-grade Radeon GPUs and IGPs, but that has changed today. In this article, we are providing our first look at the AMD FireGL V8600 1GB under Linux. We'll share our thoughts on this high-end workstation graphics card and specifically looking at how the Windows and Linux performance compares.
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Depending on how successful AMD's new triple core CPU is, it will either go down in history as a marketing achievement or blunder. I mean, we're not really talking about new technology here- the Phenom X3 is the same CPU as the Phenom X4 with one core shut off. Its as plain and simple as that.
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Friday, May 16, 2008
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We know it'd make more sense to just spend more money on a really fast card, but--two video cards! Given that you can definitely get two 3850s for $300, it seems like a reasonable upgrade option, even though I normally rail pretty hard against mid-range multi-GPU configurations. The main weakness of the 3850 is its clean performance drop when anti-aliasing is enabled. Without that, it really does scream. Will an extra $150 give it that 4xAA shine?
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