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- Date:
- Tuesday , August 05, 2008
- Author:
- Matthew Krysiak
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI R4850-T2D512 Video Card
The ATI Radeon HD 4800 series has been making waves this past month and for good reason. Today we take a look at the budget-minded side of the 4800 series with the MSI R4850-T2D512. We see how it measures up in Crysis, Age of Conan, and Call of Duty 4 on a widescreen display. Has it any AA magic of its own?
Introduction
Founded 1986, Micro-Star International (MSI) has become a well-known name to computer enthusiast. They produce motherboards, video cards, barebone PCs, rackmount servers, networking equipment, and notebooks. They cross fanboy lines by manufacturing motherboards for AMD and Intel CPUs as well as ATI and NVIDIA based video cards.
Today we are going to be focusing on one of MSI’s latest releases the MSI R4850-T2D512.
The Radeon HD 4850
On Wednesday June 25, 2008, AMD gave us a surprise. They came out guns blazing and delivered video cards that shook the market. In fact, the reverberations of this were so strong that NVIDIA slashed its own video card prices soon after. With competition back in the video card market after a 7 month hiatus things are looking up for the PC gamer.
AMD achieved all of this with two video cards that pack quite a punch for their price: the Radeon HD 4870 and the Radeon HD 4850. The latter one is what we will be looking at today. It is targeted to those with a budget, at an MSRP of only $199.
Do not let the inexpensive price and smaller designation fool you though; the GPU core has not been cut down and still contains the full 800 stream processors and 40 texture units. The only way it differs from its bigger brother is with a 125MHz core frequency difference and GDDR3 instead of GDDR5 memory modules. This leaves the Radeon HD 4850 with a reference core frequency of 625MHz and 512MB of memory at 1.986GHz.
MSI R4850-T2D512
The MSI R4850-T2D512 uses the reference frequencies for both the GPU and memory and has reference designed signal slot cooling solution. The upside here is that with no builder overclock, fancy heatsink, or any other bells and whistles this card is steal at only $160 after mail-in-rebate. That is $40 less than MSRP.
The front of the box has the usual full graphical theme, this one depicting a troll in battle armor. On the front right side, there is a minimal specification list: 512MB DDR3, HDMI Ready, and PCI Express 2.0. The back of the box lists a few more features about the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series.
The MSI R4850-T2D512 uses the standard reference design PCB and cooling solution. The cooling solution is solid copper and actively cools the GPU and memory modules. The power circuitry also has a heatsink over them but is only passively cooled. On the top of the heatsink shroud the troll in battle armor graphical theme continues. The front of the card houses the two standard DVI ports and one S-video port. On the tail end of the card is a single 6-pin auxiliary power connector.
On the back of the card is the usual uninteresting collection of electronics, retention screws, and stickers. The video card comes with just the basics: a Driver CD, a “Quick Install Guide,” a “Quick User’s Guide,” a DVI to D-sub adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, and a HDTV cable.
The Competition
For this evaluation, we will be placing the MSI R4850-T2D512 against a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. The GeForce 9800 GTX can be found for $170 after mail-in-rebate and the GeForce 8800 GT can be had for $130 after mail-in-rebate. Both are within price range of the R4850-T2D512 at $160 after mail-in-rebate.
We will begin by evaluating the gameplay experience in Crysis, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. From there we will do apples-to-apples graph for each game using the highest playable settings of the MSI R4850-T2D512. Then inspired by the impressive AA abilities of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 we will see how well the MSI R4850-T2D512 does with an AA scaling test of its own. Finally, we end with overclocking and comparing the temperatures with a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.