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Crossfire 2 x Radeon HD4850. It's the cheapest way to boost your graphics performance

Introduction

Last year we published an unforgetable article on how to Crossfire 2 Radeon HD38xx cards of different brands and different clock speeds. It worked great, though there were some glitches on some games with the Catalyst v8.4 drivers. Nevertheless, it proved that it can be done ... producing amazing results and giving gamers a massive boost in performance. This week, I want to show you what the performance is like with 2 x Radeon HD4850 in Crossfire configuration.

Firstly, we managed to get hold of 2 Radeon HD4850s ... one from MSI and one from Sapphire. Both cards are based on AMD/ATI's reference design, so the cards should be very similar, if not identical.

Then, we downloaded ATi's latest Catalyst v8.6 drivers. You can download these drivers ... HERE (Vista 32-bit). We tested the 2 Radeon HD4850 in Crossfire configuration using the following setup listed below. I installed two totally different graphic cards from different manufacturers ... a MSI R4850-T2D512 and a Sapphire Radeon HD4850. I then linked the 2 cards together using 2 Crossfire ribbon cables, which was included in the packaging.

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS defaults. ALL settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was automatically set to DDR2-1066 with the memory timings at AUTO. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using the OCZ DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 2Gb kit.

Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our operating system. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1600x1200 with high detail turned on (x4 AA and x16 AF).