My most recent graphics card purchase and therefore review, is an ATI Radeon HD4850 from Gigabyte. This card is the new 1Gb version which comes fitted with a Zalman cooler and pre-overclocked to 700mhz on the core, for reference the part number is GV-R480OC-1GH.

Background
The ATI 4850 graphics chip has been around for a good few months now and it’s been widely accepted as an excellent mid-range choice in the graphics card market. Most of the early cards came with 512Mb of onboard DDR3 RAM and were clocked at a 625MHz on the core and 1000MHz on the memory. They were also fitted with stock coolers which due to slow default fan speeds left the chips running pretty hot. Recently however the card vendors have been getting a bit more adventurous and releasing modified cards with alternative cooling solutions and pre-overclocked cards too. This one from Gigabyte has been modified with an alternative cooling solution, pre-overclocked AND given an additional 512Mb of DDR3 RAM taking it up to a full 1Gb.

I bought this card from Scan for £131.59. I figured that for about £25-£30 extra it was worth getting the larger memory, alternative cooler and factory overclock when compared to the cheapest 4850 which costs around £100-£105 at the moment.

Packaging and Bundle
This Gigabyte card comes in a rather girly looking pink box, not what you’d really expect when most graphics cards come in boxes with mean looking warriors on the front. At least the woman shown on the front of the box is clad in appropriately armoured attire and is wielding a huge weapon! Ah well lets not judge a book by its cover or a graphics card by its box design for that matter. Also on the front of the box are details of the factory overclock, up by 12% to 700MHz.

Apart from the poor choice of colour the packaging is pretty much as expected for a graphics card and once you get it open you’ll find the card itself neatly wrapped in anti-static material.

Alongside the card you also receive a User Guide, a drivers & utilities CD, a crossfire interconnect, a power adapter to convert 2 x 4pin molex to 1 x 6pin PCIe, an s-video to composite adapter, a dvi to vga adapter and a dvi to hdmi adapter. This is pretty much all you expect from a graphics card package, it’s nice if you get a little bonus like a game but that just increases costs and therefore the price also.

The Card – Specifications and Design
As already mentioned this card has an ATI 4850 graphics processor and Gigabyte have married that to 1Gb of GDDR3 RAM. This is a pre-overclocked card and Gigabyte have decided to push up the processor core clock speed from 625MHz to 700MHz, this is the highest pre-overclock that I’ve seen from any of the vendors of the 4850 range. The memory on the other hand isn’t overclocked at all which is unusual, instead it runs at the standard speed of 993MHz or 1986MHz effective as its dual data rate memory. Maybe the lack of an pre-overclock on the memory is due to the fact that each of the memory chips is twice the capacity of those on the standard 4850 cards and often the larger modules are a little slower.

As you can see from the picture the memory is made by Samsung, a reasonable memory manufacturer but it doesn’t come fitted with any kind of heatsink which is a bit concerning. Due to the type of fan fitted the memory should receive a good bit of airflow so I can’t see the lack of heatsink being a problem for stability at stock speeds but I’ve come to expect heatsinks on graphics memory these days and would have liked to see them on there.

The gigabyte card offers dual DVI output connectors and a single S-Video type TV-out connector. If you still only have a VGA connection on your monitor then obviously you can utilise the bundled DVI to VGA adapter and if you want to connect up the card to a high definition TV then there’s also a bundled adapter for DVI to HDMI and the card supports HDCP so you should be fine with Blu-Ray playback. As you can see from the picture, all ports on this card come covered with suitable dust covers including the crossfire connector.

At the power regulation end of the card you can see we have a single 6pin PCIe power connector to supply the 4850 with the extra juice that cannot be supplied through the PCIe interface. You may also notice that in keeping with the memory, there are no heatsinks fitted to any chips at this end of the card, so the VRMs are left to their own devices. Whether this will cause a problem we will have to see.

The card is a standard width as the cooling solution doesn’t protrude at all from the sides. The heatsink and fan used does however make this card a dual slot card, so be aware of that if you need all your PCI/PCIe slots available to you, especially if you plan on using this in a crossfire setup. At 9 inches (230 mm) this is quite a long card, I’m sure it’s not the longest available and it pretty much matches the X1950pro that I took out but if you have a case with limited space or a motherboard with less than ideal layout you may find it obscures something or maybe even just doesn’t fit.

A closer look at the cooling
I’ve mentioned the cooling on this card a couple of times already, so I guess we’d better have a closer look. The heatsink and fan fitted is a Zalman VF830, which is an OEM fansink made by Zalman especially for video card manufacturers to put on their cards. As such you cannot buy this fansink separately and retrofit it to a card.

The VF830 comes in 5 different colours and gigabyte have chosen to fit the copper coloured version. I guess this is to give it the copper image that suggests optimal cooling capacity! As it happens the heatsink is actually made from Aluminium fins not copper at all. There is a heatpipe embedded it the contact base that runs up to the outer section of the aluminium fins for increased heat transfer however, so that should help keep things cool.

Unfortunately the Gigabyte have chosen to route power to the fan directly on this card rather than through a fan controller as on the reference 4850 cards. This means that although it’s not as noisy as a reference cooler on 100% it’s still not that quiet. The fan connector is the usual tiny graphics card connector too which makes it very difficult to fit a resistor cable or fan controller to it. But this is something that I will be trying later though! Using GPU-Z to measure the card’s temperatures I’ve found it to idle in my setup at around 45°C (GPU Temperature) which is not too bad for a modern graphics chip. The sensor that gives the highest idle temperature is the MEMIO sensor at 50.5°C. Under the load of a highly textured spinning cube courtesy of ATITool the reported GPU temperature reaches a maximum of 64°C which is good, especially considering the extremely high temperatures seen on similar cards sporting the reference cooler.

Software Options – Compatibility
Well hopefully I don’t need to say that the drivers work as that really shouldn’t ever be a situation that you find yourself in. I’m running Vista 64bit which is probably the operating system that’s likely to cause the most problems and I haven’t had any. Gigabyte provide a software utility called ‘Gamer HUD’ which monitors the temperature and load of the GPU core and provides some overclocking options. In the Gamer HUD there are overvolting options for both the core and for the RAM but the core is on its max from the word ‘GO’ and the memory offers the option of increasing to +0.09V in steps of 0.03V but I can’t say it seems to make any difference in terms of overclockability and I’m reluctant to believe that it’s actually being applied.

Riva Tuner picks up the card correctly and allows for the overclocking of both the RAM and the GPU core but as the fan’s speed is not routed through the card’s fan control electronics the fan adjustment controls do nothing. ATITool doesn’t support the card at all really offering no options for overclocking or temperature monitoring, although the spinning cube and the artifact test still work just fine. GPU-z however, supports the card completely offering temperatures for the various oncard sensors and picking up the clock speeds properly, as does the latest version of Lavalys Everest.

Performance
This is no doubt the section that you’re all most interested in. Is it significantly faster than what I’ve already got? Well I’ve done some benchmarking and so you should be able to compare to the results I provide. Most of my benchmarking is done using freely downloadable benchmarking utilities rather than expensive games so you can try to replicate the tests on your own system. After all, who wants to spend £30 on Crysis just to compare their systems performance to that of a review?

The system that I’ve used for the benchmarking is my main desktop PC which has the following relevant spec:

Motherboard	ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38 Chipset)
CPU	Intel E2160 Dual Core (Overclocked to 3.3GHz
Memory	2GB OCZ Gold DDR3 1066MHz
Power Supply	Hiper 580W Type-R
Main Storage	Samsung 160GB SATA2 HDD
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium

I’ve also tried to keep to the same set of benchmarks that I’ve been using for my 7900GS review and overclocking article, again to aid with direct comparisons.

I use a 20″ Samsung monitor so my review tests are run where suitable at 1680 x 1050. This is quite a common resolution for the average user so hopefully it’ll provide a good comparison. I have set the image settings in the ATI driver to ‘balanced’ although generally the application will override this setting and the graphics card was run at its stock clock speeds. I will do some comparisons at a later date and also a look at how well it overclocks.

Benchmark Test	Score
Futuremark 3DMark03	43743
Futuremark 3DMark05	17931
Futuremark 3DMark06	12133
Half Life 2 : Lost Coast	122.08 fps
Counter Strike : Source	234.36 fps
Ozone 3D Fur Benchmark	144 fps Ave
ATITool 3D Cube	1204 fps

So far the performance of this card has impressed me, much as expected. It’s certainly able to play all the games that I need it too on high detail levels at the native resolution (1680×1050) of my Samsung monitor.

Conclusion
For the price this card is a good buy, if you were to save a few pounds and go for the cheaper 4850s you would loose the extra 512Mb of RAM and be stuck with the reference heatsink and fan. You may or may not find that a cheaper card overclocks higher, it’s a risk you take with a non-factory overclocked card. At least with a card that is factory overclocked your minimum achievable clock speed (default) is guaranteed to be higher.

Although the supplied Zalman heatsink is a great improvement over the ATI reference design it suffers from not having any sort of fan control. This wouldn’t be so concerning if it was virtually silent but it’s not. It’s not annoyingly loud but it’s definitely audible. I also worry about the lack of heatsinks on the memory, these can of course be added as many retailers sell suitable packs of heatsinks but it’s additional cost that shouldn’t have to be required.

Overall I’m pleased with this card and certainly don’t have anything to grumble about but I’m not fully convinced it’s definitely the best one to buy! Which is why I’ve given it an 8/10.

Pros Zalman VF830 HSF keeps it cool Great performance especially for the price Significant factory overclock on the GPU core Cons No fan control No factory overclock on the memory

Overall Score: 8/10

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If you’ve enjoyed reading this review you might also be interested in…

Overclocking: Maximum unmodified overclock for Gigabyte 1GB 4850
Review: 1GB XFX 4870 Graphics Card (HD-487A-ZDFC)
Review: XFX GeForce 7900GS Graphics Card

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