Mushkin ATI 4850 512Mb UltimateFX Graphics Card Review

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Cooling

The only thing that has left me to describe is the graphic card cooler. It was originally developed in cooperation with one of the world most famous CPU/Graphic card cooler manufacturer Arctic Cooling! The main thing here which left me with most impression is the fact that it was the quietest cooler in this roundup. Unfortunately I didn’t have any measurement device for the noise, so you’ll just have to trust me..

If you are wondering about its size, don’t worry since the cooler is 3 cm wide, and it’s made of combination of aluminium and plastic. It’s modified version of Accelero L2 Pro which specification you can find here.

It’s a bit smaller than the original Arctic Cooling product. I like that it’s 3cm wide (compared to original AC size of 5 cm). It’s also quite rewarded cooler from e-magazines and web sites, that only proved how Mushkin made the right choice to choose Arctic Cooling as their solution for the 4850 graphic card series.

One other reason why I like this modified cooling solution developed in cooperation with very well known brand in cooling business Arctic Cooling is the fact that it’s not completely made of aluminium. Although it seems that full copper or aluminium coolers have more efficient cooler, their downside is that they are extremely heavy and after a few months of work the metal based coolers tend to attract tonnes of dust from the air. So you will have to regularly dismantle and clean those graphic card cooler.

Over the weeks which I had this card for testing I haven’t had any issues with dust. The metal/aluminium part is attached to the graphic card core, while the other part of this cooler is made of plastic. I just like it since it’s very quiet, it’s even more efficient then the other two cooling solutions from Palit and Asus.

If you still want to replace this cooling solution, there are 4 screws on the main GPU cooler (as you can see on pictures in the beginning of this article), and 2 pushpins on passive memory cooler for chips. But as I’ve already mention no-one in the right mind will need to dismantle this, as the cooler is quiet and efficient.

To make this article more informative and interesting, I was able to borrow from my friend ATI 3870 graphic card, so in the benchmark results there are going to be three cards: Palit 8800GT, Asus 3870 and Mushkin 4850.

Specifications

Mushkin 4850Asus 3870Palit 8800 GT
Shader Units800320112
ROPs161616
GPURV770RV670G92
Transistor Count956M666M754M
Video RAM512Mb1GB512MB
Memory Bus Width256-bit256-bit256-bit
Core Clock625MHz776MHz600MHz
Memory Clock993MHz1126MHz900MHz

mushkin4850

Testing

The Mushkin ATI 4850 will be compared with two cards in the last year mid-range offering of both ATI and nVidia. They are not the latest and fastest cards around, but around a year ago they were most popular to gamers with the best price/performance ratio.

Palit card was tested with 190.62 driver version, while ATI 3870/4850 were tested with the latest ATI 9.10 catalyst drivers. For most test the default resolution on Viewsonic 20″ widescreen monitor was tested at 1680*1050 resolution. This is the best resolution to play the games, because higher resolution that this is just too difficult for eyes to see on 20″ monitor. And also there is no point to play the games on 1280*1024 resolution since Mushkin ATI 4850 card is still quite respectable in the mid-range category of cards. I’ve tested on some most popular games that I’ve been playing around for quite some time.

I even wanted to include two of my favourite RTS (Warhammer 2 and Red Alert 3) but when I’ve put the card details on the maximum I was always able to achieve frame rate above 30 FPS. So I’ve skipped these results, and the conclusion is that on all of these 3 cards tested in here, you can play RTS titles on high-details without any problems with effect like AA and AF set to the maximum.

So that’s why other mostly FPS have been put up right to the challenge. One last thing about the measurements that I’ve took while compiling these results. In most cases I’ve always benchmarked with FRAPS utility from which I’ve collected the statistics on frame rate (Min,Max and Average). Some of the games have internals benchmarks so I’ve compared the results between the two programs. The results were almost the same. Only in some situations there was a difference about 2-4 frames at maximum! It was such a small difference that I was unable to notice for myself. So only when the framerate drop below 25 frames (either collected internally or with FRAPS) I noticed the screen flicker effect.

Test Rig

  • CPU: Intel Core 2 duo Wolfdale E8200
  • Motherboard: ASUS Blitz Extreme P35 chipset
  • Memory: 2x 1Gb GeiL DDR3 1600 MHz memory modules
  • HDD: 2*500gb Western Digital
  • GPU: Mushkin ATI 4850 / Asus 3870 / Palit 8800GT
  • PSU: Seasonic S430w
  • Cooling: CPU Zalman 7000Cu cooler
  • Case: Antec P150
  • Monitor: Viewsonic 20″ Vx2025wm
  • Operating system: Windows XP SP3

One last thing before I go to the benchmark section. It was fun to see (I didn’t pay much attention on that before) that practically every game I’ve started for the benchmarking process had shown the message: ‘nVidia it’s meant to be played’. Well I think that the results of these benchmark won’t prove that theory right. It seems that ATI 48xx graphic card series mostly need to compete with nVidia’s GTS/GTX 2xx type of graphic cards.

Benchmarks

For most of the benchmarks, additional quality image setting were enabled with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing. The only exception from this was Crysis, which proved to be quite a challenge for most of the participants in this review.

3DMark 06 – Advanced Edition
3DMARK1 3DMARKb1

F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
FEAR1FEARb
Street fighter IV
SF4SF4b

This was a really challenging benchmark for the graphic cards. I had hoped the cards would be able to handle this without much effort, but it seems I was very much wrong.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition
LostplanetLostplanetb
Biohazard 5
Biohazard Biohazardb
World in Conflict
WicWicb

I was a bit surprised to see results from this benchmark. It was the only one where 8800GT was faster than ATI 3870 card.

Next, Benchmarks continue, temps, Overclocking, Video Playback and Conclusion.

Mushkin ATI 4850 512Mb UltimateFX Graphics Card Review

Package and Bundle - 10
Performance - 9
Price - 9
Consumer Experience - 9

9.3

Mushkin is always proved themselves with its high product quality, which consumers have always noticed! Mushkin graphic cards are also backed up with two year worldwide warranty, and this card can be found at Online shops at around 86 Euros. To sum things up, Mushkin has done tremendous job this year!

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