The AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 brings a new era for increased level-enthusiasts to ramp up their gaming platforms to Microsoft’s DirectX 11 specification, while maintaining the core platform compatibility to use DVI-D, DVI-I, and finally HDMI for newer LCD monitors. The launch of the Radeon 5000 series has brought with it a change for consumers to meet not only a great price point, but benefit with the core integration of having features such as 1440 stream processors for every GFLOP unit and much more. Incredible design aside of the Toxic HD 5850, the AMD GPU launch of this latest card definitely quenches the thirst for a handful of enthusiasts from overclocking especially to pure stability per MHz increased.

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Back when we did our review on the Crossfire 4870’s, we were left utterly impressed by the sheer amount of productivity and results that provided for an effulgence of gaming pleasure over even the latest of the Nvidia offering of the GTX 280’s and GTX 260’s with value of power and price. It seems AMD is setting the barriers this generation, and trying to cross them over and over again. With the introduction of the HD 4850 1GB and HD 4870 1GB, AMD had amped up the offering for the initial consumer price point models. Now, they’ve just broken their own barrier with the latest innovation of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 series. As the first consumer graphics card with 2 GB of memory, and the first card to implement a 512bit GDDR5 memory architecture through the inordinate amount of pixel pipelines, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card stoically dominates the competition in a whole new level for the enthusiast gamers.

We wanted to make something people can love, and feel secure with. – Dirk Meyer, President, AMD: Commenting to WhatIfGaming on the HD 4870 X2 card.

The Radeon 4800 series has many people excited since we published our review on the 4850 to our in-depth exclusive reveal first on the 4870. Now, today we bring a review on the 4870 with dual goodness. That’s right. We have 2 of these powerhouses from AMD, which reveals the introduction of the highly desirable and now most successful GDDR5 memory architecture. A complete power machine, the ATI Radeon 4870 is the most valuable card to date in terms of the Radeon evolution and Ruby keeps looking sexier by the minute. Stable temperatures, amazing performance on all DX 10.1 games with many XGA resolutions, make not only a very formidable card series in general, but a great contender as the 4870 and one that is set out to win against the competition this time around.

AMD is proudly bringing PC gamers 1.0 TeraFLOP Graphics Performance, with a single GPU that consumes only 110W of power in the HD 4850. Going head to head with the 8800GTX, 8800GTS & GT, and 9600GT series of cards. Developing a new TeraScale graphics engine, AMD is excited to deliver an impassive experience for gaming. With enhanced anti-aliasing 24X (AA) and AF, gamers will find a new realism more improved than previous versions of cards that all had AA and AF flickering sporadic problems. You’ve read our Cinema 2.0 coverage and are waiting for our detailed article on the latest 4800 series line, including ATI Radeon HD 4870 details. Now, we want to reveal one part with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 that should provide a glimpse into the new series line. With power that supports DX 10.1 fully unlike the GTX 200’s, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 brings efficiency together against the competition through features such as ATI Powerplay and ATI Avivo HD to give gamers a more enhanced experience all around.

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The 8800 GTX has represented the most powerful graphics card that sane people were willing to buy for years. The 8800 Ultra is slightly faster, but at a cost of over $600 it is reserved for those with gross amounts of disposable income. From the start, we were able to run SLI ATX and get incredible performance. Nowadays the GTX is starting to become long in the tooth as far as graphics cards go, 15 months is a very long time with nothing faster to come along. The latest games are certainly pushing even a pair of GTX’s to unplayable levels at higher resolutions. So what are we owners of 30” LCD monitors to do to get playable frames at our native resolution? Enter 3-way SLI, a fully functional and much sorted extension of the Quad SLI. NVIDIA has been hard at work on multi-GPU performance and with the limitation of only 3fps pre-render in Direct X9 and below out of the way in Direct X10, the stage is set for extremely expensive graphics solutions. For those who do not remember, Quad SLI was plagued by the fact that for the money, it was a horrible investment. It offered very marginal performance benefits in all but a select few applications and thus never adopted as the true high-end solution.

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Today we are testing the new ASUS EAH3850 TOP and EN8800GS TOP graphics cards in a head to head comparison. These $200 US graphics cards deliver serious performance and come with overclocked factory settings, and improved cooling solutions. We expect more from GPU manufacturers this time around. The most recent card we have with us today is the GeForce 9600 GT, which tunes in great. But alas, there is tons of competition on the other brim as the HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards have also been able to remain very competitive. Currently the Radeon HD 3870 is priced between $190-$200 US while the GeForce 9600 GT costs roughly $170-$180 US, and both produce very similar results.

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Making your own computers costs a lot. We can write about amped up stuff, but this is different. This is the market that ECS is reaching for with moderate end solutions—yet remaining very close to the GTX

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ATI has been busy the past couple months getting the Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series out the door and today is the day! ATI has moved on to the 55nm process which is an improvement over the 65nm manufacturing process and both the Radeon HD 3650 and 3450 are built on the new process. You might have heard rumors about these video cards under the code names RV620 and RV635, but now that they are official they have been given real product names. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon 3450/3470 cards all range between $49 and $99 so they are competitively priced entry-level DirectX 10.1 compliant GPUs that offer full UVD support with all the latest technology that ATI uses.

The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is the direct replacement for the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro as you can tell. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is active cooled with a core clock of 725MHz and a memory clock of 800MHz and will be available with two kinds of memory ICs – GDDR3 and GDDR2. The slower and older GDDR2 memory chips will be used on the $79 price point cards, while the $99 cards will feature faster GDDR3 memory ICs. The reference Radeon HD 3650 that we have today uses GDDR3 memory IC’s, so it is the $99 card. The faster clock speed and memory frequencies improve the memory bandwidth and math processing rate on the Radeon HD 3650 when compared to the older Radeon HD 2600 Pro. Also keep in mind that both the Radeon 3400 series and 3600 series are PCI Express 2.0 compliant and support DirectX 10.1 features as well as ATI PowerPlay software.

LightsMark Demo Results:

Lightsmark 2007 v1.3 showed the ATI Radeon HD 3650 doing pretty well against the ATI Radeon 3850 256MB and was able to turn in good numbers at even 1920×1200. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 needs more muscle to break 30FPS, but it was close.

The ATI Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon HD 3450 didn’t turn in great benchmark results, but at $49-$99 these are entry level cards and aren’t supposed to be geared at hard-core gamers. At lower resoltions with low quality settings they will easily play older DirectX 9 games, but as you saw in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. benchmark section DirectX 9 games with high quality settings are still demanding on graphics cards. If you are looking for gaming performance the ATI Radeon HD 3850 is leaps and bounds a better choice.

The XFX GeForce 8800 GT price versus performance ratio is ideal for the enthusiast community and the feature set is impressive. NVIDIA didn’t forget about you guys and has just recently released the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB video card that is aimed at lower price points. The GeForce 8800 GT 512MB has been in such high demand the price has remained above $269.99, so the need for a more budget friendly card is a welcomed addition to the GeForce 8 lineup. As the wind goes on so does the testing.

Test

Even at smaller resolutions the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB has a hard time keeping up with the Radeon 3850 and Radeon 3870, which are both priced at or under what the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB is available at. The GeForce 8800 GT 256MB faces tough competition thanks to the Radeon 3800 series and it only clearly beat the Radeon 3800’s in Bioshock. Be sure to consider what games you play the most and the performance of the cards on them when you make your next purchase.

Anyone that has contemplated purchasing an NVIDIA video card in the last 5 years has likely considered an EVGA card. They’re always on warranty, concerned and are on mostly every forum even if it’s slightly hardware related.

Looking at our card we see that the PCB is a standard green with a nice looking black heatsink. The EVGA logo is prominently displayed along with the type of card it is, so that no one, not even you, will forget what you have. I do like this for the simple fact that you won’t make a mistake this for a 7600 GT or something else. Lurking under that heatsink is the GPU core, clocked at 400MHz, the reference speed for 7600 GS cards. I noticed that EVGA uses all solid aluminum capacitors on this card, which can help give it a longer life over standard electrolytic capacitors. The 512MB of memory comes clocked at 400MHz also.

Benchmark – R6: Vegas

Team Rainbow is a multinational task force comprised of counterterrorism experts from around the globe. Equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, Team Rainbow is deployed during terrorist crises. When all other attempts have failed, Rainbow is brought in to save the lives of innocent people. They do not negotiate with terror. They destroy it. Vegas is a video card killer that depends more on shaders speed than memory speed. Our 7600 GS has a hard time keeping up in Vegas and you may need to drop down the resolution to get playable frame rates depending on your definition of playable.

G71 core the 7950 GT is here. Though the name is similar don’t confuse it with the 7950GX2. The 7950 GT is a single GPU video card with the same G71 core as the 7900 GT and 7900 GTX. 7900 GT to 7950 is a big change for the 7950 GT and a move to 512MB of memory. At $299 the 7950 GT is big news as it brings a new low price to high-end video cards sporting 512MB of memory. It’s also the opposite of what ATI did with their X1900XT 256MB that we reviewed yesterday. We’re starting to see a separation between cards with 256MB and 512MB in some of the latest games at higher resolutions, giving gamers performance.

When it comes to speed the 7950 GT does not disappoint. The reference 7950 comes clocked at 550MHz core and 1.4GHz memory. That’s 100MHz core, 200MHz memory slower than the single card flagship 7900 GTX. With the introduction of the 7950 GT and 7900 GS there is now no room for the 7900 GT, so it will be phased soon. Better throw it in the dump now. No one will buy it.

Benchmarks

3DMark 06: 6054

Using default core and memory clocks of 550MHz and 700MHz (1.4GHz effective data rate) respectively, the GeForce 7950 GT includes a 512MB frame buffer (256- bit GDDR3 memory interface), 8 vertex shaders, 24 pixel pipelines (each of which includes a dedicated texture unit and 2 pixel shader processors), and 16 ROPs, consuming a max of 82W of power based on the suggested settings by NVIDIA. Our XFX GeForce 7950 GT Extreme 570M comes factory overclocked 20MHz on the core and 30MHz on the memory, but also comes without a mean and hungry fan. XFX GeForce 7950 GT Extreme 570M is impressive and consumes very little power compared to others.

Overall, everyone should buy a XFX GeForce 7950, it won’t be disappointing.