The Radeon HD 4850 is the card that has put AMD back on the graphics card map over the past month. While the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 were both good cards, a constant line-up of NVIDIA cards along with price drops meant that the aging technology was having trouble keeping up with cards not only in a similar price bracket, but cheaper again. The Radeon HD 4850 though, has brought performance computing to the masses at a good price, which is what the market wants. The Radeon HD 4870, while more expensive is still at an extremely competitive price point. The latest Radeon HD 4850 to come into the labs is from Gigabyte and we are looking into its performance. - TweakTown

Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 512MB Video Card Review

Gigabyte has started using a new box which looks great. The colors and overall design of the box is pretty refreshing. There isn't a whole lot of information going on at the front of the box, though the top has the Gigabyte logo along with the ATI one. Across the bottom of the box we have the model clearly shown along with how much memory we have, and which in this case is 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Turning the box over, we have a bit more detail. Again we see the model across the top with the ATI logo. The middle is filled up with information regarding Avivo, CrossFire support and about the 55nm technology of the core.

Looking at the card, there isn't really anything we haven't seen before. Gigabyte have opted to use the standard cooler and of course placed a sticker over the top that lets us know that it's a Gigabyte card. Like all the reference coolers, we can see another heatsink towards the back of the card that helps cool some of the other warmer components that are present. Moving away from the cooler and having a quick look around the card, we see the standard single 6-Pin PCI Express connector located at the back of the card while across the top we see our two tabs for the CrossFire bridge for combining two graphics cards.

Following in its reference design, the video card comes clocked at the standard 625MHz core speed and the 512MB of GDDR3 memory coming in at 1986MHz effective. The Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 card, like every other reference design Radeon HD 4850 carries with it some good performance and an excellent price to performance ratio. We can see against the mid-range GeForce 9600 GT at the lower resolution there isn't much difference. As we increase the load on the card by upping the resolution or turning on anti-aliasing, the Radeon HD 4850 really begins to shine against the competition with smoother frame rates.

Inside the package we have everything we need, from a CrossFire bridge to a DVI to HDMI adapter. And it would have been nice to have seen a full version game included in the package, but it doesn't seem to be something that many ATI partners are doing at the moment. If you're looking for a good valued Radeon HD 4850 that goes fast and doesn't cost much money, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 is a good choice. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but this helps keep price down and means that you can enjoy high frame rates at a decent resolution for a good price.