Last two moves were price drops on Radeon HD 4870 and HD4870X2 as reaction at new nVIDIA models and replacement of HD 3850 models. Soon we can expect to find HD 4850 graphics cards with price tag around 70€, so we decided to test one interesting model that is signed by BIOSTAR that can be even more interesting than some HD 4870 models.

First contact with packaging of BIOSTAR HD 4850 256MB is not something that you will remember in the future as pleasant. Inside the box you will find accessories that can be described as spartan but this attribute can be, in this case, considered as generous. Believe it or not, but beside CD with drivers we didn’t find anything else in the box besides graphics card itself. You won’t get DVI-VGA converters, S-Video cables and other more or less usual accessories. BIOSTAR set an example when comes to spartan packaging of graphics cards. If you are interested to find out are these savings justified and how good is graphics card that we found in the package, please continue reading.

Graphics card build is excellent and without doubt we can say that this is, so far, the best Radeon HD 4850 that we had in our hands and test lab. Power section is one of the best that we saw so far, cooling solution is very efficient and it doesn’t take up too much space (single slot). Fan on this graphics card is larger than fans that we used to see on most Radeon graphics cards. Larger diameter of fan allowed BIOSTAR to use fan with lower RPM (2500-3000) that resulted in very silent cooling solution. Almost all connectors that one graphics card needs can be found on this one: DVI, D-Sub and HDMI. S-Video is one connector that is lacking. ATI recommended manufacturers to use DDR2 memory on HD 4850 graphics cards (and DDR3 on 4870), but BIOSTAR have used DDR3 memory on this model. This decision made BIOSTAR HD 4850 very similar to HD 4870 graphics cards. To spice things up, BIOSTAR used default frequency for GPU (600MHz) and “slightly” higher frequency for memory (1600MHz).

Increase in frequency of DDR3 memory on this model from default 1000MHz to 1600MHz, resulted in increased memory bandwidth that 128bit memory bus will appreciate. To make things even better BIOSTAR used 1ns DDR3 memory that can be further overcloked at 2GHz. Because of all this we managed to set frequencies of this HD 4850 to default values for HD 4870. BIOSTAR HD 4850 256MB overcloked in this way had almost the same performance levels as any HD 4870 model at default frequencies. Benchmark results confirmed all this and BIOSTAR HD 4850 reached identical results as HD 4870. Results on default frequencies can be found on next page.