facebook rss twitter

Review: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 vs. AMD Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire - battle at £450

by Tarinder Sandhu on 5 April 2010, 05:00

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaxp5

Add to My Vault: x

How we test

Graphics cards HIS Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire 2 x 1,024MB HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB EVGA GeForce GTX 275 896MB
Current pricing, including VAT £450 £550 £360 (estimated) £310 £225 £450  £319 £350 £275 £199
Shader model 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 4.0 4.0 4.0
Stream processors 2,880 3,200 1,600 1,600 1440 480 448 480 240 240
GPU clock speed (MHz) 725 725 925 850 725 700 607 576 648 633
Shader clock speed (MHz) 725 725 925 850 725 1,401 1,215 1,242 1,474 1,404
Memory clock speed (MHz) 4,000 4,000 5,000 4,800 4,000 3,698 3,348 2,016 2,484 2,276
Memory bus width (bits) 256 x 2 256 x 2 256 256 256 384 320 448 x 2 512 448
CPU Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (3.20GHz, 8MB L3 cache, quad-core, LGA1366 - Turbo Boost on)
Motherboard ASUS P6X58D Premium
Motherboard BIOS 0703
Mainboard software Intel Inf 9.1.1.1025
Memory 6GB Crucial DDR3-1,067 CL7
Memory timings and speed 7-7-7-20 1T @ DDR3-1,066
PSU Corsair HX1000W
Monitor Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600px
Disk drive(s) Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB SSD
Graphics driver Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a ForceWare 197.17 ForceWare 197.17 ForceWare 197.13 ForceWare 197.13 ForceWare 197.13
Operating system Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit

Software


Benchmarks DiRT 2 v1.1, London map - ultra quality
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X v1.2, internal benchmark: DX10/10.1 - high quality
Far Cry 2 v1.03 - very high quality
Crysis Warhead v1.1.1.711 - train map - enthusiast quality
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 v523648 - FRAPS-recorded benchmark
Unigine Heaven 2.0 benchmark

Power-draw
Temperatures
HEXUS.bang4buck and HEXUS.bang4watt
Overclocking

Notes

Benchmarks were conducted at 1,680x1,050, 1,920x1,200, and 2,560x1,600, where applicable, with decent degrees of image quality. We've tested with the very latest drivers available from both companies.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is an all-new benchmark and DiRT 2 has also been updated to v1.1 since the last slew of tests. The patch appears to provide better performance for NVIDIA GPUs.

Conjecturing somewhat, AMD already has the twin-GPU Radeon HD 5970 in its arsenal and that card should be a little quicker than the two Radeon HD 5850s, thanks to a Radeon HD 5870-like shader-count. But you never know...

The upcoming graphs will have the Radeon HD 5850 XF and GeForce GTX 480 in non-regular colours, making them easy to spot.