13 - The Conclusion
The Verdict
If you take a regular run of the mill Radeon HD 4850 you already have a lot of value in your hands, really. And props to Gigabyte for sure, they just really improved the product. The one negative I could find is that the Zalman cooler is a tad too noisy for my taste, but other then that ... nothing about this product can be even remote negative. For a fair price you get the best of all worlds. Extra framebuffer to play around with, a fairly decent overclock on the GPU, overall fine overclocking experience and next to that the customized PCB with the, though noisy, Zalman cooler. Noisy or not, the temperatures are bloody fantastic, really impressive. The highest temperature we measured directly at GPU low-level was 59 Degrees C -- under a full GPU load test.
A small tip, try to overclock the memory just like we did. The 4850 craves and loves memory bandwidth which will yield a better framerate.
So in retrospective, at 199 USD / 170 EUR any Radeon HD 4850 with 1GB just offers astounding, seriously let me say that again, astounding performance for the money. You really can't go wrong with that product, no matter what brand you purchase. Let's recap a little, we have been playing Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 with 4xAA and all image quality setting maxed out at an average of 32 frames per second.
Crysis performance is pretty darn good. Devil may Cry 4 pushed the card towards great performance and in my favorite new title, Mass Effect more than fast enough. So yes, we can discuss it over and over again but money wise you just can't go wrong with the Radeon 4800 series, you'll love them without any doubt.
Gigabyte has a very ncie product at hand here, completely customized and very tweakable. Despite the higher risk factors they continue to offer three years warranty which I certainly can respect.
So generally this product is performing faster than the reference Radeon HD 4850, and then you have some extra reserves play around with. What's not to like about it ? Short and simple -- Highly recommended.
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