AFTER LOSING OUT on a couple of generations, ATI/ AMD has roared back into the game with a fantastic new GPU-the HD 4850. MSI, one of ATI's premium board partners, sent us the R4850-T2D512 well before launch, and we spent some quality time with the card. The new RV770 architecture from ATI lies at the heart of this board, and it's suitably jaw-dropping. It has 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, and nearly 1 billion transistors.

The 3870 series had only 320 stream processors, 16 texture units, and a paltry 666 million transistors. The new architecture can use GDDR5 memory, but that's only used on the 4870, not the 4850, which sticks with plain old GDDR3. The new cards support 8 channel audio over HDMI, which is good news for HTPC enthusiasts.
All this technical gobble dygook translates to just one thing-sheer performance across the board.

Card
MSI usually sticks to the reference design, and this card is no different. Clad in traditional ATI red, the first thing that struck us was the size of this card. It's a single slot card, and it looked too small to deliver high levels of performance. There's only one PCI-E power connector, which is great for the vast majority of people that don't have massive 1000 watt PSUs. Power consumption is quite low, idling at about 160 watts, and using around 230 watts of power under load. A good 500 watt PSU is enough to run one of these cards.

The card runs very hot though, touching nearly 90 degrees Celsius under load. The fan spins very slowly, and is not audible, but if you'd rather have it spin¬ning faster to cool the card down, you have to manually edit an XML file; check www.pcworld.in for details.



Performance
We plugged the card into our test rig, running off a Intel P45 based mother¬board, with a Core 2 Extreme 9650 CPU, 2 GB of Kingston HyperX RAM and a 300 GB Western Digital Velociraptor. All of this was powered by a Tagan BZ-1300 PSU. 3D Mark 2006 first revealed the power behind that unas¬suming facade. With a score of 12990 3D Marks, it was merely 1000 points behind the Nvidia 9800 GTX, a card that costs nearly Rs. 9,000 more.

In Crysis, it actually beat both the 9800 GTX as well as the 3870X2 with 33 fps, compared to 25 fps on the 9800 GTX and 32 fps on the 3870X2. World in Conflict showed a similar increase, with the 4850 getting 30 fps, 8 fps more than the other two cards. In F.E.A.R, it was faster than the 9800 GTX, but slower than the dual GPU 3870 X2. Unreal Tournament 3 scores were slightly less than the 9800 GTX, scoring 95 fps to the 9800's 102, and the 3870X2 was faster than both at 114 fps.
In every benchmark that we ran, the 4850 was either faster than the 9800 GTX, or merely 5-10 percent slower. It's been a long time since we could unequivocally recommend an ATI card for the gaming enthusiast, and it's great to see ATI back on competitive terms with Nvidia.

Conclusion
A single slot card that runs on one PCI-E power con¬nector, and delivers the performance of cards that are nearly twice as expen¬sive: how could you possi¬bly go wrong? The MSI R4850-T2D512 gets a rare score of 91 on 100, and a Superior Rating.