Mushkin ATI 4850 512Mb UltimateFX Graphics Card Review

Crysis – High Quality

The only game that has really put up these graphic cards for a sweat… The only game where I had to forgot about AA and AF. The game settings were so too high, but those were the only one. I must say that I was surprised to see Mushkin 4850 to win in this round-up. I always thought that nVidia cards were faster in this game. Again, I was definitely wrong about this.

Batman Arkham Asylum 1680 × 1050

Temperatures

Temperature measurements from these test cards were:

Video Playback

For home and HTPC PC’s this card is very quiet, but it’s just that dimension of this cooler could cause troubles in some narrow computer cases. Nowadays modern CPU’s like Core2duo or Dual core can handle video playback without much of a hassle. Ok, only Matroska type of files put a lot of stress on the graphic card and CPU, but its overall usage is below 30%. Other Divx, Xvid and Mpeg-2 files were playing quite normally.

I’ve started to benchmark these, but when I saw the results I decided to simply drop it, as there isn’t much sense to measure this. All of these card were more than capable to play most of the FPS/RTS titles, so video playback really isn’t any issue when you have this card. Unless you’re going to play some game, play the video, surf the web and burn some DVD at the same time.

To me it’s much more important that it has HDMI, D-sub and DVI connector in one place, so the card could be easily connected to any time on any generation of TV, home theatre or other digital playback system.

Overclocking

Now for the over clocking part. Default 2D clock settings for this card (when it’s not working any graphic task) is 500 MHz for GPU clock, and 700 MHz for the memory clock. When you start some 3D application or game, the clocks instantly start to work on default frequency at 625 MHz GPU clock and 993 MHz for the memory clock, so I can say that AMD’s PowerPlay technology really works as it should.

I was very much surprised how this card is over clocking without any additional voltage or doing some hacks which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone – pencil mods. With this card I could achieve 716 MHZ as current maximum GPU frequency, while memory clock was set high as 1131 MHz

The temperatures vent up higher for about 7-10 degrees, but still everything was rock stable. The best part is that I haven’t reached the upper limit when over clocking this card. It’s just that since I’m already late with this article writing, I had to write these values that surely work. But I’ll keep you notified on forum discussion what are the maximum achieved frequencies for this card.

Conclusion

It’s nice to see Mushkin re-enter again the graphic card business, since lately it has become very competitive market with no-name Asian cards showing up from every corner. But Mushkin as in memory business and now it graphic card market is trying to earn its reputation with stable, quality and always giving more to consumers then competition. This graphic card surely proves my previously stated claim, and that is MUSHKIN = QUALITY. A lot of companies in last 10 years thought to earn ‘easy money’ entering the graphic card business. But lots of them noticed that to sell more, more and more graphic cards isn’t enough these days. You have to have some advantage over the competitors.

As I’ve have stated at the beginning of this article, they have expanded their product offering. Second thing that their European part internally has restructured to the name of ‘Ironstone distribution’. I don’t have much more details on this, but they have said to me that they are running now their job more efficiently. That’s not all folks, and recently they have (finally) redesigned their website! Hope that the new site will be much more informative and easier to navigate.

Finally, last week they have opened online web shop, primarily targeting the European market. You can see it here – Mushkin

To conclude the part on Mushkin all together now, Mushkin really put a slap on the face of this years’ world-wide recession, don’t you think also?

I don’t really have much of a choice and that this card earns my full recommendation! If you don’t have 26″ LCD monitor and don’t want to play some latest DX11 titles on Windows 7 platform, this card is really the right choice for gamers on a budget. The smart thing you could do for now is to wait for additional three to four weeks as the holiday season will come in no time, so the rebates from various (I hope smart) retail-shop or online-etailers are going to offer nice Christmas discounts. This gives you the chance to purchase this great card and get the most out of your money.

Although it’s really not expensive since it’s price one year ago was around 160 – 180€. From nVidia side? I think it can’t match current offerings from ATI. They could drop prices for now, but it seems the Fermi based nVidia card are going to be launched in first quarter of 2010. Thanks once again to nice people from Mushkin who made this review possible. Also for their constant support and understanding for some delays that have occurred with the delivery service.