Gainward has been an NVIDIA partner for a long time, but as it tends to happen in the IT industry. things do change from time to time. As of recently Gainward decided to join the red team, as well, and as we could notice, it has done it very well. It is as such the first time that Gainward went for the red team but not as such for the full red design which we are quite used to from them. But yes, Gainward is now playing on both horses which is a nice change. They will still keep to their NVIDIA range but expand their products further via the latest ATI line-up. Today, we take a quick look at Gainward's first non reference ATI card, the Radeon HD 4850 Golden Sample version. - FudZilla

Gainward Radeon HD 4850 Golden Cool Card Preview

As a part of Gainward's Golden Sample series this card comes with a factory overclock and a non reference cooler. The card works at 700MHz for the core and has 512MB of GDDR3 memory which works at 2200MHz effctive. This is a nice factory overclock, if you consider that the reference card works at 625MHz for the core and 1986MHz for the memory. The card features the more hefty voltage design, and unlike the reference Radeon HD 4850 which uses the 6-pin power connector, this one comes with an 8-pin power connector. The extra power is to keep the card stable and to make that impressive overclock possible.

The video card is still based on ATI's great RV770 GPU which is built in 55nm manufacturing technology and has 800 shader processors. Due to the impressive overclock, Gainward decided to use the non reference cooling on this card. Unfortunately, this means that the card uses two slots, but at least it should end up to be cool and silent. The cooler has two heatpipes connected to a rather large heatsink, which is then cooled by a 65mm fan.