eVGA 285 GTX vs. Sapphire HD 4890 vs Crossfire

[SamHughe]

I recently switched to HD4890 CF setup from eVGA 285 (I can't do SLI due to my chipset) and I thought I'd share the benchmarks I did to compare these two cards.

Contestant #1
GPU eVGA GeForce GTX 285
Core Clock 648MHz
Stream Processors 240 Processor Cores
Memory
Memory Clock 2484MHz(effective)
Memory Size 1GB
Memory Interface 512-bit
Memory Type GDDR3

Contestant #2
GPU Sapphire Radeon HD 4890
Core Clock 1000 MHz (4.0Gbps)
Stream Processors 800 Stream Processing Units
Memory
Memory Size 1GB
Memory Interface 256-bit
Memory Type GDDR5

Testing Platform:
Xeon X3370 @ 3ghz+ TRUE Copper + SFlex SFF21F (1600RPM @ 600RPM)
Asus P5E-WS PRO X38
8GB Mushkin DDR2 (996559) 1066
4x VelociRaptors (Raid 0) on Areca1100
MM-UFO
Corsair HX1000W
X-FI Elite Pro
Vista Ultimate 64
HansG 28” Monitor 1920x1200 Native, 3ms, HDMI

All cards were tested on the same system. 285 was tested first then uninstalled. Single ATI card was installed and tested. The second card was added, configured and tested. Drivers: Nvidia 185.85, ATI catalysis 9.4. Both drivers are set to quality and AA, AAF were left application controlled. Fraps was used for benchmarking.

Three games, 3dmark 06 and Vantage were used to compare the cards. More details below. No special preparations for benchmarking or games were made. Everything was stock.

I set Fraps for 5 minutes benchmark. Before doing any benchmark, I pre-determined where to go and what to do in the games then rehearsed it several times. So I am pretty confident that for each game test, I followed very similar paths.

Results:
Game 1: HL2
Settings: 1920x1200, 16cssa, everything is maxed out. VSynch off
I picked a spot in the Point Insertion map between two check points (pre-determined) and ran around until the benchmark done.


Game2: Fallout3
My Fallout3 is loaded with three modes: HD pack, real eyes, HD pip boy. Res: 1920x1200, everything maxed out. FPS cap was removed. Vsynch:off
I used a saved location in Megaton and I ran around for 5 minutes as fraps was benching.


285 and 4890 performed almost identically. CF didn’t make any difference at all! Quick research on the net revealed that this is a well-known problem. Some people suggested changing the exe name to Oblivion.exe helps so I changed it. It helped with the minimums but didn’t significantly affect the results.

Game 3: Crysis Demo + Real lifesis mod.
1920x1200 8x AA and everything in game is maxed out.
I went to the pre-determined location in a heavy vegetation area and ran between the two check points for 5 minutes. Results:


3DMark06


Vantage (Performance)


Other thoughts:
Performance:
If, as some people claim, 275 performs better than 4890, that means 275 also performs better than 285. It just doesn’t make sense. HD4890 and 285 gtx perform very close.

Price:
Sapphire 4890 can be purchased for $259 ($239 after MIR) @ Newegg
EVGA 285 gtx can be purchased for $349 (319 after MIR) @ Newegg
Looking at the performance levels, HD4890 is a winner from a price perspective.

Heat and Noise:
HD4890s run very VERY noisy anything above 30% fan speed. Fan at 100% the noise is unbelievable, much like a hair dryer or a leaf blower. It is simply ridiculous! Cannot be used without aftermarket HS/fan. With the fan set to 30% the cards idle around 65C and hit 90C+ under heavy load. Never experience anything like this with 285 gtx. Absolute deal breaker for me.

Physical dimensions:
HD 4890 is shorter therefore fits better into smaller cases. Didn’t matter much in my MM-UFO case.

Physical appearance:
eVGA 285, with its black pcb and subtle graphics on the front, looks better. I find the fake screws and bolts decal around the fan on the Sapphire HD 4890 as juvenile as the bullet decals on a redneck’s truck.

Software:
Both ATI Control Center and eVGA Precision tool offers great options. No problem installing/uninstalling drivers. Both work great.

IQ:
I know this is a controversial topic. My subjective observation is with HD4890, colors look slightly better balanced overall. Definitely doesn’t mean 285 IQ is bad. Totally subjective opinion (as most of this review).

Final verdict:
HD4890 and 285 GTX perform roughly the same in 3D applications. 4890 is cheaper but much noisier. 285 performs a tad better overall. Crossfire is a gamble. It usually doesn’t work/scale in most of the scenarios (so doesn’t SLI). I am puzzled as how did people like the guys at TPU make 4890 CF scaled 90% in most of the games? I am open to any suggestions.

[Leeghoofd]

Would it be possible to redo the 4890 test at stock speeds of the normal 4890 plz ( 850 GPU speeds/3900mhz ram ) to compare the scaling of your OC'ed version.

thanks in advance

[xman01]

good review

[SamHughe]

Would it be possible to redo the 4890 test at stock speeds of the normal 4890 plz ( 850 GPU speeds/3900mhz ram ) to compare the scaling of your OC'ed version.

thanks in advance

That's a good idea. I can certainly do that.

good review

Thanks!

[matsjuw]

I was always looking to go for GTX285, but this review definately changed my mind about that.
Very nice review, you saved me some money

[chispy]

'' redo the 4890 test at stock speeds of the normal 4890 plz ( 850 GPU speeds/3900mhz ram ) to compare the scaling of your OC'ed version ''

+1

Nice little review.

[trans am]

What? no overclock them both as high as they can and bench? which one scores higher after overclocking on their stock coolers and stock voltage?

[tajoh111]

I have a problem with this statement.

Other thoughts:
Performance:
If, as some people claim, 275 performs better than 4890, that means 275 also performs better than 285. It just doesn’t make sense. HD4890 and 285 gtx perform very close.

Final verdict:
HD4890 and 285 GTX perform roughly the same in 3D applications. 4890 is cheaper but much noisier. 285 performs a tad better overall. Crossfire is a gamble. It usually doesn’t work/scale in most of the scenarios (so doesn’t SLI). I am puzzled as how did people like the guys at TPU make 4890 CF scaled 90% in most of the games? I am open to any suggestions.

You overclocked the 4890 close to 20 percent. My 4890 with 100% fan plus 300cfm of air cannot even stabilize at 950mhz with all programs. If one was simply looking at the graphs, without reading the testbed(the graphs should mention the 4890 is OC to 1000mhz), they would be totally mislead. Which I think people like railmeat and matsjuw seems to have missed. Did you run standard fan profile to run 1000mhz? Was it actually game stable. It might work for 5 minutes but what about 2 or 3 hours.

This review is almost designed to make NV bad(whether that was your intentions or not).

I find three flaws with this review, running a card that overclocked to unrealistic levels for most people while running the gtx 285 at plain stock,

Running 8x AA which is unplayable for both cards. People want to max playable settings, this test just seems to make NV look bad because 8x and above is especially troublesome for NV cards. It might have a point if AMD could run with that settings, but it can't not even close.

I know it is a mini review but you needs more games, I have never seen a review where the synthetic tests are so similar in number to the number of games.

I think matsjuw, might have made a premature decision, if he wanted absolute performance, as the 4890 is definitely better for price for performance as well as the gtx 275.

Considering fallout3 has been a 4890 biased games.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3555&p=15
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid..._11.html#sect1

And you tested with NV newest drivers which are supposed to bring up performance.

The gtx 285 when both are stock might just smash the 4890 considering it beat it, in a 4xxx favoured game, and the 4890 was heavily overclocked. On the same grounds, a gtx 275 looks to do very well against a 4890 since it very similar in speed to a gtx 285 and when overclocked, it outperforms it.

[dinos22]

fail!

[fatguy1992]

"Crossfire is a gamble" ya amen to that too....sli is very close to flawless vs xfire nightmares/issues...again u get what u pay for.

I agree, when I had dual 4870's it was the biggest pain. Less then 50% of my games got any improvement, and when they did it wasn't that much more. I also got tons of weird graphic glitches as soon as I enable CF, and they would go away when I disabled CF. In the end I sold the second card.

BTW not a bad review, but I'd much rather see all the cards at stock speeds.

[lee143]

You say that test at 8x AA is trouble for both cards but from the review, it seems the cards are playing these games fine. And then you turn to the excuse that it's unfair because Nvidia has "problems" at 8x AA and above.
I've owned a fair share of both companies' cards and they both produce fine cards.

Thanks for the review Sam, but as others have mentioned, it'd be nice to see stock performance as well. Also, do you think you could show us how high the GTX 285 overclocks?

[tajoh111]

Would you call 15 fps fine? Thats choppy as hell and completely unplayable. This is a hollow victory because noone will use 8x AA with a single videocard at 1920*1200 with max settings with crysis because noone wants to play a fps under 30 fps let alone 15. The only reason I can imagine someone using this setting is just to make NV cards look bad. One resolution and setting test is not the recommended way to test playability, and to do it is setting where neither card can handle makes the results useless, since games are for playing not for slide shows.

Don't you think a bench mark where atleast one of the cards is playable is a far more useful than one where all the cards are unplayable because it shows us a card has an advantage in regards to image and playability. This just shows us the cards are far too slow to play crysis at these settings as both are completely unplayable. If you played crysis you would also know that foliage is not where this games faulters, its when you get into fights so you would get even worse FPS there.

Although people don't have time to bench all resolutions and settings, test at one a resolution and settings people actually use.

[SamHughe]

Hello everybody,
Thanks for all the comments. I respect your opinions. This review is not perfect by any means. I didn't set out to review two products. I already purchased two 4890s and I was going to install and test them for my pleasure anyways. This is more like sharing the experience. Please keep this in mind.

Couple of points needs clarifying for the sake of argument:

Why did I oced 4890 but not 285?
I didn't overclocked anything. This is the stock clocks on the Sapphire Cards. Absolutely out-of-the-box condition. I played games for hours, no problems so far. Some of you feel that these cards oced to unbelievable levels. I guess Sapphire did a good job then. Cause I didn't touch them. Having said that I definitely see the point. So right now I am repeating all the tests with stock clocks on ATI cards. Stand by for those results.

You are biased:
I have absolutely no reason or motivation to be biased. I spent my hard earned money for both NVidia and ATI cards. I tell it as I see it. No BS. I'd like to summarize here what I said in the review.

HD4890
+Cheaper
+Smaller
+Performs ALMOST the same as 285

-Noisy
-Runs hotter
-CF doesn't improve anything or scale as advertised in most cases

eVGA285
+Performs better overall (although at marginal levels)
+Runs cooler, quieter
+Looks better

-More expensive (especially if you wanna go SLI/TriSLI)
-Huge

I am sure I am missing alot of things but that means I haven't experienced them during these tests or they didn't apply in my case.
Hope this helps to clarify the things a little. As I mentioned earlier. Please standby for the test results with stock clocks.

[SamHughe]

Here's as promised. I am going to skip the graphs for now. These are the results for HD4890 at stock speeds (850 GPU speeds/3900mhz ram as indicated by Leeghoofd earlier) vs Sapphire OCed clocks. I am not going to make any comments so you be the judge.

[WaterFlex]

Thank for your job, mate ! Nice review

[tajoh111]

Are you sure you are running 1000clk, the performance gains don't seem right.

Is this a vapor-X edition? Those are the only ones that ran stock 1000mhz core. Not only is the thing overvolted compared to the stock, it has a much much better cooler.

Can you rerun crysis at playable settings? I think the results would be more useful.

[Leeghoofd]

Can you add them nrs in your graphs Sam plz in ya first post, thx for the effort

[lee143]

Would you call 15 fps fine? Thats choppy as hell and completely unplayable. This is a hollow victory because noone will use 8x AA with a single videocard at 1920*1200 with max settings with crysis because noone wants to play a fps under 30 fps let alone 15. The only reason I can imagine someone using this setting is just to make NV cards look bad. One resolution and setting test is not the recommended way to test playability, and to do it is setting where neither card can handle makes the results useless, since games are for playing not for slide shows.

Don't you think a bench mark where atleast one of the cards is playable is a far more useful than one where all the cards are unplayable because it shows us a card has an advantage in regards to image and playability. This just shows us the cards are far too slow to play crysis at these settings as both are completely unplayable. If you played crysis you would also know that foliage is not where this games faulters, its when you get into fights so you would get even worse FPS there.

Although people don't have time to bench all resolutions and settings, test at one a resolution and settings people actually use.

You're basing all your remarks on one game, is 100+ fps not playable for you?

[paul_]

Hmmm... In light of this, I may get a 4890 instead of a 285. If it's that much cheaper, it'd be worth dealing with the noise (I have 3x 3000RPM fans on my Rad anyway). Being able to max out fallout3 WITH HD mods would be great. I wanna try HL2 with more of the fakefactory mods now...

BTW, how do you like your 3370? 775 all the way for me, at least for now.

[SamHughe]

BTW, how do you like your 3370? 775 all the way for me, at least for now.

Wise decision. You might wanna read THIS.

[MomijiTMO]

So what games do you have where xfire worked?

[Carfax]

What? no overclock them both as high as they can and bench? which one scores higher after overclocking on their stock coolers and stock voltage?

Seconded.. The test would have been more interesting if the GTX 285 would have been overclocked..

[Mescalamba]

For crossfire working, I would try maybe renaming game .exe file or forcing other crossfire method.. tough not sure if it can help always. But it does, sometimes..

For me, SLi or Crossfire are not exactly too useful things as they depends on drivers or driver setting.. hope that Hydra chip will be reality some day.. today .. one working GPU is much better than sometimes working two GPUs.

Btw. difference between 850/1000 MHz GPU seems.. hm.. too low? Is it really only that few FPS gained?

[SamHughe]

So what games do you have where xfire worked?

So far the only game I noticed a big difference is Crysis Demo. I have couple of other games to try (Company of Heroes, Mass Effect, Stalker).

[Russian]

Good benchmark reviews.