Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 512 MB (GV-R485OC-1GH)

The fifth graphics card in our today’s test session was provided to us by Gigabyte. Radeon HD 4850 512 MB (GV-R485OC-1GH) is built according to the reference design but features a Zalman cooler with two heatpipes:

The card is built around a fully-fledged RV770Pro (55 nm) graphics processor without any limitations or any disabled units. The GPU frequency has been increased quite substantially above the nominal for Radeon HD 4850 (625 MHz) and equals 700 MHz.

The 512 MB of onboard video memory come from Samsung (the chips marking reads K4J10324QD-HJ1A). Video memory works at 1986 MHz effective frequency, which is exactly according to the graphics card specifications.

Just like on all other cards, we adjusted the working frequencies of our Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 512 MB (GV-R485OC-1GH) to match the reference values during our test session:

This card consumes no more than 110 W. the cooler is unfortunately quite noisy and works at a constant speed (around 2200-2500 RPM).

MSI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB (MSI R4870-T2D512)

The next graphics card is a reference solution manufactured under MSI brand name. It is Radeon HD 4870 512 MB:

The card uses RV770 GPU, but its clock frequency should be 750 MHz unlike that of the Radeon HD 4850. However, on MSI graphics card it has been increased to 800 MHz. The graphics processor has 800 unified shader processors, 40 texturing units and 16 raster units.

Video memory chips used on this graphics accelerator are exactly the same as the ones used on Sapphire Radeon HD 4730 or reference Radeon HD 4770. However, their effective frequency is not 3600 MHz as the Radeon HD 4870 specifications claim, and even not 4000 MHz as we could assume judging by the nominal access time of Qimonda chips (with IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X marking), but 4400 MHz, which is even higher than that of Radeon HD 4890 video memory!

We brought the working frequencies of MSI Radeon HD 4870 to the reference values and in this case MSI solution consumed 170 W of power. Therefore, it is equipped with two additional six-pin power connectors. The reference cooler of this card generates the same extremely high noise as on other Radeon HD 4870 solutions.