Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking…so close yet blocked again

Please note that overclocking your HD4850 will void your warranty.

In addition, we strongly recommend you NOT overclock your card when using the stock cooler on this card. In this case we used the Arctic Cooling S1 Rev.2 with a 120mm fan installed in all the overclocking tests which resulted in suitably controlled temperatures.

After looking at what the Catalyst Control Center had to offer, I must say that I was not overly impressed with the overclocking options it presented. The memory could be overclocked to a suitably high level if I chose to go that route but the core had a maximum speed pegged at 700Mhz which is 75Mhz over stock values. Let’s see what we finally ended up with.

Core: 700Mhz
Memory: 2252Mhz (DDR)

Well, that is surprising isn’t it? The core topped out at 700Mhz and wouldn’t budge one Mhz further due to the limitation in the Catalyst Overdrive panel but the memory really shone. Even though I wasn’t expecting much from it, the GDDR3 on this card really surprised me with a top overclock of 2252Mhz DDR which represents a 266Mhz overclock. We are looking forward to applications which will help increase the speeds past what the Catalyst Control allows. Unfortunately, there is no way we would encourage users into BIOS flashing the card itself so that route has been ruled out by us automatically.

All in all, you can see that this resulted in an approximately 1600 point increase in 3DMark06: