Testing/Benchmarking

Here's a quick look at the system that I'll be testing the Sapphire 4850 Toxic video card in. 

The test system is an all-in-all pretty well rounded system that isn't overbalanced in any one direction. While using an Intel Core2Extreme Quad core CPU (which would cost more than the rest of the system combined) would be a way to guarantee we weren't maxxing out the CPU during any of the tests, most of the games are going to give real-world tests. So my goal was to try and show what kind of results you could obtain from a system that could be built on a reasonable budget with other mid-range components. We're looking to build a capable gaming machine without breaking the budget. 

Overclocking

As always, overclocking the video card is an At Your Own Risk adventure. There have been mixed success stories of people overclocking their 4800 series cards and the most successful has come by way of mods to the cards themselves. Mods such as flashing the BIOS of the card with different voltage and clock speed settings,  and a popular "100k ohm resistor mod" have yielded some pretty extreme results. The downside to these methods - your warranty is voided immediately. 

The ATI Overdrive tool in the Catalyst Control Center is the quickest and least invasive means to control clock speeds via adjustable sliders.  Unfortunately, it is rather limited. For those who wish to let the Overdrive utility do the work for you, there is an automatic configuration utility which will test the card and determine its highest and most stable overclock. Again, the utility has its shortcomings because it was not able to read the GPU temperature of the Sapphire 4850 Toxic.

The sliders maximum values gave us a GPU core speed of 700Mhz and a memory clock speed of 1200Mhz. Even though those settings passed the utilities own self test, they did not work once benchmarking began. In the end, it comes down to the same old "Your Mileage May Vary" disclaimer. What I was able to find was achieve was a core clock speed of 700Mhz, but the memory speed wouldn't budge from its stock setting of 1150. While it can be a little disheartening not getting much of an overclock out of the memory, we have to remember that the card is already overclocked from the reference design. I'm glad to see another 25Mhz out of the core!

The Windows Vista Performance meter is a rather simple yet effective way to scale out the software requirements versus your hardware capabilities. So far, 5.9 is the highest rating I've seen any sub-system achieve and the overall score is basically the score of the lowest component. In our case, that would be the CPU with a 5.8  - so the overall score for this system is a 5.8. But these scores show us we should expect no issues from the graphics card running the Windows Aero desktop.

Futuremark's 3DMark2006 and 3DMark Vanatage will get cracks at the first run of synthetic benchmarks for the Sapphire 4850 Toxic.

3DMark06