Radeon HD 4850 Vs. GeForce GTS 250: Non-Reference Battle

[cleeve]

Tired of bog-standard reference graphics cards differentiated by nothing but a box? We pit Gigabyte's GV-N250ZL-1GI (with Zalman cooling) and Asus' EAH4850 MT (with adjustable voltages) against each other to see if either of these boards stand out.

Radeon HD 4850 Vs. GeForce GTS 250: Non-Reference Battle : Read more

 

[rags_20]

In the second picture of the 4850, the card can be seen bent due to the weight.

 

[rags_20]

The Gigabyte would be more effective with 2 fans.

 

[tuannguyen]

[citation][nom]rags_20[/nom]In the second picture of the 4850, the card can be seen bent due to the weight.[/citation]

Hi rags_20 -

Actually, the appearance of the card in that picture is caused by barrel or pincushion distortion of the lens used to take the photo. The card itself isn't bent.

/ Tuan

 

[jebusv20]

demonhorde665... try not to triple post.
looks bad... and eratic. and makes the forums/coments system
more clutered than need be.

ps. your not running the same bench markes as Toms so your not really comparable.
yes, same game and engine, but for example in crysis, the frame rates are completely different from the start, through to the snowey bit at the end.

pps. are you comparing your card to there card at the same resolution?

 

[alexcuria]

Hi,

I've been looking for a comparison like this for several weeks. Thank you although it didn't help me too much in my decision. I also missed some comments regarding the Physix, Cuda, DirectX 10 or 10.1 and Havok discussion.

I would be very happy to read a review for the Gainward HD4850 Golden Sample "Goes Like Hell" with the faster GDDR5 memory. If it then CLEARLY takes the lead over the GTS 250 and gets even closer to the HD4870 then my decision will be easy. Less heat, less consumption and almost same performance than a stock 4870. Enough for me.

btw. Resolutions I'm most interested in: 1440x900 and 1650x1080 for 20" monitor.

Thank you

 

[spanner_razor]

Under the test setup section the cpu is listed as core 2 duo q6600, should it not be listed as a quad? Feel free to delete this comment if it is wrong or when you fix the erratum.

 

[KyleSTL]

Why a Q6600/750i setup? That is certainly less than ideal. A Q9550/P45 or 920/X58 would have been a better choice in my opinion (and may have exhibited a greater difference between the cards).

 

[B-Unit]

[citation][nom]zipzoomflyhigh[/nom]and no the Q6600 is classified as a C2D. Its two E6600's crammed on one die.[/citation]

No, its classified as a C2Q. E6600 is classified as C2D.

 

[KyleSTL]

ZZFhigh,

Directly from the article on page 11:

Game Benchmarks: Left 4 Dead
Let’s move on to a game where we can crank up the eye candy, even at 1920x1200. At maximum detail, can we see any advantage to either card?

Nothing to see here, though given the results in our original GeForce GTS 250 review, this is likely a result of our Core 2 Quad processor holding back performance.

Clearly this is not an ideal setup to eliminate the processor from affecting benchmark results of the two cards. Most games are not multithreaded, so the 2.4Ghz clock of the Q6600 will undoubtedly hold back a lot of games since they will not be able to utilize all 4 cores.

To all,

Stop triple posting!

 

[weakerthans4]

The default clock speeds for the Gigabyte GV-N250ZL-1GI are 738 MHz on the GPU, 1,836 MHz on the shaders, and 2,200 MHz on the memory. Once again, these are exactly the same as the reference GeForce GTS 250 speeds.

Later in the article you write,

or the sake of argument, let’s say most cards can make it to 800 MHz, which is a 62 MHz overclock. So, for Gigabyte’s claim of a 10% overclocking increase, we’ll say that most GV-N250ZL-1GI cards should be able to get to at least 806.2 MHz on the GPU. Hey, let’s round it up to 807 MHz to keep things clean. Did the GV-N250ZL-1GI beat the spread? It sure did. With absolutely no modifications except to raw clock speeds, our sample GV-N250ZL-1GI made it to 815 MHz rock-solid stable. That’s a 20% increase over an "expected" overclock according to our unscientific calculation.

Your math is wrong. A claim of 20% over clock on the GV-N250ZL-1GI would equal 885.6 MHz. 10% of 738MHz = 73.8 MHz. So a 10% overclock would equal 811.8 MHz. 815 MHz is nowhere near 20%. In fact, according to your numbers, the GV-N250ZL-1GI barely lives up to its 10% minimal capability.

 

[dimaf1985]

This whole article is completely invalid and the results are skewed because, as was documented on tweaktown, Catalyst 9.3 performance is much lower compared to 9.2. Catalyst 9.4 reclaims some of those performance losses, but 9.2 is still a bit better, if you compare the two analyses. Redo these tests with 9.2 drivers.

 

[universalremonster]

[citation][nom]weakerthans4[/nom]Later in the article you write,Your math is wrong. A claim of 20% over clock on the GV-N250ZL-1GI would equal 885.6 MHz. 10% of 738MHz = 73.8 MHz. So a 10% overclock would equal 811.8 MHz. 815 MHz is nowhere near 20%. In fact, according to your numbers, the GV-N250ZL-1GI barely lives up to its 10% minimal capability.[/citation]

No what he is saying is this- Gigabyte claims that the extra copper in the PCB will allow for a 10%-30% further increase compared to how much a standard cards speed can be raised by overclocking. So saying that a standard card oc's to 800MHz which is a 62MHz increase, Gigabyte is claiming a 6.2 (10%) to 18.6 (30%) MHz further increase on top of that. So "technically" a 20% increase would have put it at 816.4 MHz, only 1.4MHz more than the 815MHz he acheived.

 

[Dax corrin]

Time to ban DemonHorde 665, the abuse of the English language is making all dead spelling teachers spin in their graves.

 

[universalremonster]

personally I think it's the Zalman accounting for a bulk of the 20% extra and not the couple ounces of copper. That cooler rocks.

 

[Ramar]

To the reviewer: Good article, but you forgot two things:

The GTS 250 is a 9800GTX+ is a 9800GTX is -also- an 8800GTS 512. So this...3 year old card is still running strong.

Also, Gigabyte's Ultra Durable is for two functions, overclocking and obviously, durability. Yes, it will overclock better. But it also will probably never stop functioning.

From someone who's gone through numerous motherboards and graphics cards with minimal overclocking on either, that means a lot more than performance.

 

[tacoslave]

it is known that nvidia cards tax the cpu less. So if a title is cpu bound than the nvidia card will usually come out on top. Thats why you see them performing similarly when resolutions increase and when you move away from cpu dependency

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]KyleSTL[/nom]Why a Q6600/750i setup? That is certainly less than ideal. A Q9550/P45 or 920/X58 would have been a better choice in my opinion (and may have exhibited a greater difference between the cards).[/citation]

It's in the specs but I should have stressed the point: I overclocked the Q6600 to 2.7 GHz, it was plenty quick for these cards.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]Ramar[/nom]To the reviewer: Good article, but you forgot two things: The GTS 250 is a 9800GTX+ is a 9800GTX is -also- an 8800GTS 512. [/citation]

Not exactly. The 8800 GTS at least sported diffrent clockspeeds. I also believe it was on a larger die, if memory serves.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]tacoslave[/nom]it is known that nvidia cards tax the cpu less. [/citation]

Is it? If so, please provide some proof of that statement as I haven't seen evidence of that.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]weakerthans4[/nom]Later in the article you write,Your math is wrong. A claim of 20% over clock on the GV-N250ZL-1GI would equal 885.6 MHz. 10% of 738MHz = 73.8 MHz. So a 10% overclock would equal 811.8 MHz. 815 MHz is nowhere near 20%. In fact, according to your numbers, the GV-N250ZL-1GI barely lives up to its 10% minimal capability.[/citation]

You misunderstand Gigabyte's claim. As universalremonster points out, they're alaiming a 10% increase in overclocks over other GTS 250's, not claiming that all of their cards will overclock 10% over stock clocks.

 

[Ramar]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]Not exactly. The 8800 GTS at least sported diffrent clockspeeds. I also believe it was on a larger die, if memory serves.[/citation]

It's the same G92 chip with the same number of processors, albeit before the die-shrink. The original 9800GTX was the same process; the GTX+ was the die-shrink. My only point was the fact that this is still basically the same chip from three generations [Around two years and four months] ago. The fact that it's running at 815mhz compared to even the 738mhz from the die shrink is impressive and makes my vanilla 9800GTX look pitiful.

 

[RazberyBandit]

[citation][nom]dimaf1985[/nom]This whole article is completely invalid and the results are skewed because, as was documented on tweaktown, Catalyst 9.3 performance is much lower compared to 9.2. Catalyst 9.4 reclaims some of those performance losses, but 9.2 is still a bit better, if you compare the two analyses. Redo these tests with 9.2 drivers.[/citation]
And while you're at it, take them both off an nVIDIA chipset motherboard and throw them on an AMD one for comparison's sake. Certainly never strikes me as odd when you see ATI and nVIDIA cards compared on an nVIDIA motherboard that the nVIDIA card holds at least a slight advantage throughout the test.

Wanna call your tests fair, use more than one manufacturer's architecture as a testbed. Or is THG still afraid to do a true Dragon Platform series of tests?

 

[Pei-chen]

Wish you had included a stock speed 4850, 4870, 250 and 260v2 for reference. My 4870 1GB is barely 20% faster than 4850 1GB.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]RazberyBandit[/nom]Wanna call your tests fair, use more than one manufacturer's architecture as a testbed. Or is THG still afraid to do a true Dragon Platform series of tests?[/citation]

Dude, I couldn't disagree more. For fairness, you use the SAME motherboard, you don't pick and choose platforms for each card. If you use a diffrent platform for each test, you're not comparing the graphics cards, you're benching the systems.

I can't recall seeing hard evidence that the 750i chipset slows down Radeon cards, if you have access to that please share it with me. If not, you're getting into conspiracy theory territory.