Gigabyte 4850 1GB
Packaging and Up Close
Gigabyte have always supplied good packaging on their products, and the 4850 was no exception. The card came in perfect condition, and the packaging was all in tact.
The box comes with a simple two colour scheme, with a CGI character on the front. The box has a few key features of the card, but not too many, which is refreshingly clean. Inside the outer box is a white box which has a large flap to reveal the card inside. The hole at the back is used for lifting another flap, which conceals the included bundle.
Included inside we have: Quick start guide, User manual, Driver disk, HDMI adapter, DVI to D-sub adapter, PCI-e to molex power adapter, TV connection adapter and a Crossfire bridge. This is a fairly good bundle, with the HDMI adapter probably the most useful inclusion; the rest is pretty standard.
The card itself isn’t particularly ‘busy’. Unlike a lot of cards it isn’t dominated by an overly large cooler. The card is also fairly compact, and should fit into all but the smallest of cases. The card uses a 6pin power connector, which means it will run on a low spec PSU and shouldn’t harm your wallet too much with the electricity bill.
The cooler itself is manufactured my Zalman. It uses a pair of heatpipes to conduct the heat away into the fins and fan. Unfortunately the cooler doesn’t provide any cooling for the memory, and with 1024MB of it, it may get a bit toasty. The cooler itself is tall enough to take up two slots, which seems a bit of a shame; it would have been far more practical for the end user to have a longer but single slot cooler.
Something we don’t usually see is the little rubber covers over all the connectors. Gigabyte have even covered the two crossfire connectors (for Crossfire X). We’re not sure if the covers are a good or a bad thing, it does help to prevent dust and other foreign objects the ports, but doesn’t really offer any other benefits. As they don’t match the PCB for colour, they also look a bit out of place. Nice idea but not really needed.
