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Summer 2008 Graphics Performance Roundup
Author: Harry Butler & Richard SwinburnePublished: 11th July 2008
Club 3D Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Manufacturer: Club 3DUK Price (as Reviewed): £114.95 inc VAT
Core Clock: 625 MHz
Shader Clock: 625 MHz
Memory Clock: 2,000 MHz (effective)
Warranty: Unconfirmed
To say the HD 4850 is the "baby" of the new 4000-series generation of ATI Radeon products seems a little insulting considering that there's two and a half times more stream processors, 800 instead of 320, crammed into the new core.
Not only that but ATI has managed to keep the board power down to 110W, so it can still use a single slot cooler like with the HD 3850, despite a larger die size with 300M more transistors, whilst the 55nm foundation process has remained the same.
This year Club 3D is ATI's launch partner for HD 4850. The box is unusually more upright than wide, but regardless it still holds the contents securely enough. In the box there's a basic extra bundle, with one DVI to VGA adapter and a 7-pin S-Video to Component adapter cable. There's a CrossFire bridge cable if you want to add another 4000-series (remember, like the 3000-series you can mix and match 50s and 70s) and finally a quick help install guide.
The Club 3D version of the HD 4850 mirrors the reference design almost identically, except for the sticker in the middle of the fan. You get a red PCB with red and copper cooler that's again almost identical to the HD 3850 in size, weight and looks. Essentially ATI has just tweaked the design with a few component choices so the card can withstand a slightly higher temperature. Trust us, it needs these design tweaks, because the 4000-series gets hotter than a Newcastle Vindaloo during use.
Bar the GeForce 8800 GT, this is the only next generation single slot solution in our line-up, so for those in confined environments, such as SFF users, the results for this little bad boy will be well worth keeping an eye on. It features just a single PCI-Express 6-pin power connector and has PCI-Express 2.0 (although backward compatible with all x16 graphics slots), as well as two CrossFire connectors if you're expanding into fully fledged CrossFire-X.
The card still features a "full" 512MB of GDDR3 at 2GHz (effective) and fast 625MHz of core clock speed for £115 but since it's so close to the previous generation's design, expect 3rd party coolers and overclocked versions to arrive in no time.
Warranty
Unfortunately we were unable to confirm the warranty of Club 3D products, there's nothing on its website, nothing on the box and no warranty card in the box either. As far as we can tell Club 3D operates a standard 12 month replacement warranty, as per your standard consumer rights. if this is the case, this isn't exactly great, as many graphics card manufacturers offer two, five or even ten year transferable warranties on their cards.Addendum 29th July 2008: Club3D got in contact with us to confirm that it offers a two year warranty on its products.
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