Gigabyte 4850 1GB

Introduction

The attention within the graphics industry is often placed upon the top end cards: which one gives the most eye candy and which one batters through Crysis best. Therefore, it’s easy to forgot those cards that sit further down the price scale, but often punch well above their weight. Today we will be looking at one such card, the 4850.

Although it’s not a new GPU, we’ve only looked at the 512MB version so far. This model is different because it comes with 1GB of graphics memory, which should prevent the core from being starved of memory, providing much smoother frame rates. It should also handle larger resolutions and the bigger textures that go along with this, moving it more and more into high end card territory.

The Gigabyte card we will be looking at today runs at stock clocks, and comes with a Zalman cooler pre-fitted. Here are the full specifications:

– ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU @ 625MHz
– 1024MB GDDR3 Memory @ 1986MHz
– 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
– PCI Express 2.0 support
– 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
– ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology
– Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
– Shader Model 4.1
– ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
– Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray and HD Video
– Built-in HDMI with 5.1 surround sound support
– On-chip HDCP

Whilst there is nothing particularly new on the list, the specifications are all good and it should net some pretty good performance, especially for the market point which the 4850 is pitched at. Take a look at the card itself on the next page.