Can a $10 Radeon HD 4850 still run GTA SA, Crysis and CoD4 in 2026?
3d 5h ago by lemmy.world/u/RiskRig91 in retrogaming
Picked up a used Gigabyte HD 4850 with Zalman aftermarket cooler for $10. The Zalman cooler kept temps at just 53°C — massive difference from my previous HD 3850 that hit 106°C! Tested on a Core 2 Duo rig with GTA SA, CoD4, Crysis and more. Full video here: https://youtu.be/0ORqQPk7kjs
Hey, much better this time around! And I got to be your first view on the video!
Assuming you’re still open to feedback, these are my personal takes:
- The music doesn’t add anything. Either get a great musician behind your music or just cut it.
- The runtime felt long.
- If you don’t want to show your face or use your voice, that’s fine, but you need another way to make the video stand out. Maybe an editing and/or recording style that stands out and is also entertaining. This is not an easy thing to accomplish, and I, again, strongly recommend you don’t use AI to try to answer this question, since it requires creativity and that’s not its strong suit. Additionally, there’s usually a sweet spot between being unique enough to be different and “trying too hard”, which AI is also terrible at finding - it’s why entertainment is hard. I recommend you trust your gut and just try different things until you find something that resonates with people.
Thanks for being the first view and for the detailed feedback! These are my first videos so I'm still finding my style. I've already noticed the pacing issue myself — by the time I reach the HD 5000 series the videos will be faster and tighter. I'm also trying to improve the quality with every new video. On the music, YouTube's copyright system is very strict so options are limited, but I'll keep experimenting. Really appreciate the honest feedback!
Yeah, I’ll go one step further: if I see any evidence of AI slop being used in someone’s work, I dismiss the work and don’t engage it further. That’s people’s water, being chugged by those data centers, for mediocre and untrue bullshit. It directly harms people.
Put the AI in the garbage and use actual elbow grease and real thought.
I had one of these :-)
Edit: I liked the video! I love old hardware :-)
I agree on the music with the other comment - either make it stand out/vary it or remove it, it gets monotonous after a while. Narration would be nice, but it's not required.
I found myself fast forwarding quite a bit - i appreciated the level of detail you went with cleaning the card for example, but one gets the gist after seeing how the die and the first part of the pcb got cleaned, no need to show the whole process in full length/normal speed + the cooler, and show the reassembly after already seeing the disassembly when there isn't anything to watch out for when doing it in reverse.
Thanks for the feedback! When I made these first videos I wanted to show the full process step by step — in case someone wants to do it themselves and needs a reference. But I agree it gets tiring after a point. After the HD 5000 series the videos will be faster with fewer scenes. On the music I'm still searching — YouTube's copyright system is very restrictive. Really appreciate you taking the time to watch and comment!
If there's something you want to show in detail, I would suggest making a separate video specifically for that, and then saying, there's a longer video to show you exactly what I did over here if you're interested, otherwise, just keep watching.
This is also very helpful if it ends up being something that's very similar to something else that happens in the future, because then you can reuse the one DIY how-to video as a reference point for all of the future videos.
That's actually a really smart approach — a separate dedicated how-to video for the maintenance process and then reference it in future videos. Saves time in the main video and makes it more reusable. I'll definitely consider this for future videos, thanks!
I had one of these in a build with a mobo that supported Crossfire x4 (ATI’s implementation of SLi at the time). Fast forward a few years later and I’m on a different build and so are all the guys in my lan group. One of them mentions throwing theirs up on Craigslist to make a little cash. I offer him $50 so I can mess with crossfire. Turns out there’s a few other 4850’s I can swoop up on the cheap and for the fun of a 4x crossfire mess.
Man… that didn’t do shit but generate needless heat and run everything worse than a single card. But I did manage to try a 4x GPU’s build and we had a good laugh running stuff like Crysis on it with an old Phenom 3 at the next lan.
Haha 4x Crossfire sounds like an absolute disaster — so much heat for worse performance! But that's the kind of experiment you do just to say you did it. Running Crysis on 4x HD 4850 with a Phenom is peak LAN party energy!
Oh yeah, man. Thankfully, I had no delusions about it being anything other than a shit show.
I certainly miss those days. Bring back, dedicated servers dammit!
I thought Crysis was more CPU intensive so gpu performance isn't that important.
Exactly! That's why I overclocked the CPU to 3.8GHz to alleviate the bottleneck. But you're right, Crysis runs way smoother on a Quad-Core. The GPU still takes a massive beating though!
I think I had one of these... Is this the one that came with Half-Life 2? Maybe it was the 4750 🤔
That would have been the first or second PC I built entitely from brand new parts and not Frankensteined together from other PCs. My dumbass paired it with a Celeron tho. It was cheaper than a Core 2 Duo and had four cores instead of 2! 😩
Haha the Celeron trap — more cores but way slower! The 4850 didn't come with Half-Life 2, that was the 9800 Pro era with ATI. But it was definitely a legendary card in its time!
Maybe it was the 3rd machine I built, then. 🤔 I had a 9800XT, too, at some point. Up until AMD bough ATI, I was only ever using ATI cards.
The 9800 XT was a great card! And same story for a lot of people — ATI had some really strong offerings before the AMD acquisition. The HD 4850 era was probably their peak value for money!