Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1GB GV-R485OC-1GH review

Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1024 (GV-R485OC-1GH)

Gigabyte submitted their Radeon HD 4850's with a hefty 1GB memory size for review. Next to that unusually large framebuffer, we do notice some important other features like custom cooling. The cooler used is actually a Zalman cooler. The cooler itself is circular with fins attached onto a circular heatpipe, we'll show you all this in our photo-shoot.

The middle radial fan blows air through the fins and creates turbulence to move the heat from the fins to the air. The cooler itself really offers great performance. It's however at a constant RPM and not throttling down when you are in desktop mode making it a little noisy.

When we look at the PCB of the card, we immediately spot that the layout is different, this is a customized PCB, hopefully that will yield some good overclocking results as well. Gigabyte's house color is blue, so is the PCB. The RV770 GPU itself on the 4850 will run overclocked as well at a 700 MHz clock frequency. Let's have a peek at some specifications.

The memory used is GDDR3 and runs just like a regular 4850 at 2x990 MHz at 1980 MHz, the 1 GB obviously will get your some more texture space, cache and obviously it can help in more complex AA modes (8xAA and above) which are highly dependant on large framebuffers to work in.

You can expect roughly a 110-120 Watt peak watt power consumption. At a 199 USD introduction price, we expect this to be a very competitive product on the market. Last thing I need to mention, included in the box are:

Bundled we see the following:

• Radeon HD 4850 - 1 GB frame buffer
• Manual
• Driver CD + Cyberlink powerDVD
• Crossfire connector
• DVI to D-sub adapter
• DVI-HDMI adapter
• Molex to 6-pin power converter (1x)

Overall a little bit of a shy bundle, but the price of the product was kept low, close to the standard 512Mb model. So you get less bundled items yet more hardware for your money. But overall the product from a hardware point of view is already impressive. Some good news though, Gigabyte will top off this product with three years warranty. Two thumbs up for that.