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With all this hubbub lately around the new HD4890, it's easy to
forget that there are other video cards out there to consider.
Which is a shame, as AMD has been very aggressive with price cuts in
the mid-range GPU market. The HD4850 has been one of the
greatest beneficiaries of these price cuts, checking in as low as
$129. This low price also opens up opportunities for the GPU
vendors to add potential value to their versions of the card with
non-reference designs, which brings us to today's review: the
Sapphire HD4850 Vapor-X edition.
The HD4850 Vapor-X edition renews Sapphires Vapor
Chamber technology for a new generation of hardware, replacing the
stock single slot cooler with a new killer dual slot variety.
The Vapor-X first made its appearance with the HD3870 Atomic, after
which the same cooler also appeared on the Toxic variants of the
HD3870 and HD4870. The clocks of the Vapor-X are the same as
the reference clocks, but with any hope, the improved cooler should
help with overclocking of the card. So how does it handle?
Read on and find out!
Features:
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256-bit memory interface
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Quite and Powerful Dual Slot Vapor-Chamber
Cooler, Under 20 dbA in 2D Operation, under 30 dbA in 3D
Operation before 85 degree °C
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DirectX® 10.1
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24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and
high performance anisotropic filtering
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PCI Express® 2.0 support
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Dynamic geometry acceleration
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Game physics processing capability
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ATI Avivo™HD video and display technology,
Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray™ and HD VideoBuilt-in
HDMI with 7.1 surround sound supportOn-chip HDCP
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ATI PowerPlay™ technology
Specifications:
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ATI Radeon
HD 4850 |
ATI Radeon HD 4870 |
ATI Radeon HD 4890 |
| Process |
55nm |
55nm |
55nm |
| Transistors |
956M |
956M |
959M |
| Engine Clock |
625 MHz |
750MHz |
850 MHz |
| Stream Processors |
800 |
800 |
800 |
| Compute Performance |
1.0 TFLOPs |
1.2 TFLOPs |
1.36 TFLOPs |
| Texture Units |
40 |
40 |
40 |
| Texture Fillrate |
25.0 GTexels/s |
30.0 GTexels/s |
34.0 GTexels/s |
| ROPs |
16 |
16 |
16 |
| Pixel Fillrate |
10.0 GPixels/s |
12.0 GPixels/s |
13.6 GPixels/s |
| Z/Stencil |
64 |
64 |
64 |
| Z Fillrate |
40.0 GSamples/s |
48.0 GSamples/s |
54.4 GSamples/s |
| Memory Type |
GDDR3 |
GDDR5 |
GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock |
993 MHz |
900 MHz |
975 MHz |
| Frame Buffer Size |
512MB/1GB |
512MB/1GB |
1GB |
| Memory Data Rate |
2.0 Gbps |
3.6 Gbps |
3.9 Gbps |
| Memory Bus |
256-bit |
256-bit |
256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth |
63.6 GB/s |
115 GB/s |
124.8 GB/s |
| Maximum Board Power |
110W |
160W |
190W |
| Idle Board Power |
30W |
90W |
60W |
Now that we have gone over the specifications,
shall we take a look at the card itself?
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