System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 TOXIC EDITION 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MiB | BFG GeForce 9800 GTX | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ | XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current pricing, including VAT | £149 | £125 | £175 | £129* | £139** |
£210 |
| Shader model | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| Stream processors | 800 | 800 | 800 | 128 | 128 | 192 |
| GPU clock speed (MHz) | 675 | 625 | 750 | 675 | 738 | 576 |
| Shader clock speed (MHz) | 675 | 625 | 750 | 1,688 | 1,836 | 1,242 |
| Memory clock speed (MHz) | 2,200 | 1,986 | 3,600 | 2,200 | 2,200 | 2,000 |
| Memory bus width (Bits) | 256 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 448 |
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 LGA775 (3.0GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, quad-core) | |||||
| Motherboard | MSI X48 Platinum (X48+ICH9R) | eVGA NF68 (nForce 680i SLI) | ||||
| Motherboard BIOS | P2B2 | P31 | ||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.4.0.1016 | NVIDIA device driver 15.08 | ||||
| Memory | 4GiB (2x 2GiB) DDR3-1066 | 4GiB (2x 2GiB) DDR2-1066 | ||||
| Memory timings and speed | 7-7-7-20 2T @ 1066MHz | 5-5-5-15 2T @ 1066MHz | ||||
| PSU | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | Gigabyte ODIN GT 800W | ||||
| Monitor | Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600px | |||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GiB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |||||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 8.6 R5 | CATALYST 8.6 R4 | CATALYST 8.6 R4 | NVIDIA ForceWare 174.74 | NVIDIA ForceWare 175.19 | NVIDIA ForceWare 177.34 |
| Operating system | Windows Vista Business, 64-bit | |||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks | Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
v2.103: DX9 - very
high quality Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.2 (demo_00010.dem, map Valley): OpenGL - vhq Lost Planet: Extreme Condition v1.004 built-in benchmark: DX10 - high quality Crysis v1.2.1 custom-recorded benchmark: DX10 - high quality |
|---|
Notes
* in severe constraint. Hard to find in stock.** not available yet. Stock expected in seven days.
We've pulled in reference-clocked Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards for performance-comparison purposes. Knowing that the underlying architectures are the same, performance is dictated by frequencies alone, and the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 TOXIC EDITION is neatly sandwiched between the two.
Providing the competition from NVIDIA are three SKUs. The GeForce 9800 GTX has seen a slashing of its online pricing, in direct response to the introduction of the two new AMD SKUs, and can be found on pre-order for around £129. Please note that stock of the card is hard to find at this price. The recently-introduced GeForce 9800 GTX+ - a die-shrink version of the regular GTX - will be available within a week, according to NVIDIA, and should ship with a street price of £139.
At the very high end, and the only card above £200, is a stock-clocked GeForce GTX 260 from XFX. It's patently not a direct competitor to the Sapphire TOXIC card, but should provide decent numbers highlighting what performance, if any, is afforded by spending an extra £60.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1,680x1050, 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600 with decent image-quality settings as well. However, we've omitted the 2,560x1600 results for Crysis and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition running in high-quality modes because they produced what we consider to be non-playable frame-rates.
