We have looked at quite a few Radeon HD 4850's ever since the card launched earlier this summer and many of them have had very good custom cooling solutions. None however, have been passively cooled until today, as we've got Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4850 1GB, complete with its Multi-Core passive cooling solution. What's more we haven't looked at how the Radeon HD 4850 reacts to more memory because it just hasn't been an official AMD product and partners haven't really pushed it until now. Maybe there was a reason for that, because it was as if AMD delayed the launch of the Radeon HD 4870 1GB until there were enough titles released that benefitted from the additional memory. - Bit-Tech

Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 Multi-Core Cooling Review

Gigabyte loves to brand up the technologies it introduces on its motherboards and the same is true with its line of graphics cards as well. The Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 Multi-Core version is no different in that respect and it's a custom designed card through and through. Now however, despite the massive design overhaul, the PCB remains the same length as the reference design and it still requires just the one 6-pin PCI Express power connector to operate correctly. The card makes use of Gigabyte's ultra durable technology. What we can tell you though is that the Multi-Core cooling technology works, and works very well.

While temperatures that approached 100°C may sound rather alarming, when you factor in that this was with absolutely no airflow within a notable distance of our test machine after several hours of Crysis crunching, it's a testament to how good the cooling solution is. And despite the temperatures, the card remained perfectly stable throughout this particular phase of our testing. And what made things all the more impressive was that, as soon as we introduced one 120mm fan blowing air over the heatsink's fins, the temperatures dropped to well below 50°C after many hours running tests in our benchmarking sweatshop.

Their board comes with a slight overclock on the core, which is running up at 640MHz compared to the ATI recommended speed of 625MHz while the memory has been underclocked from 1986MHz to 1920MHz. And at first, we are sure this seems a little alien, but it's something that many manufacturers do when they increase the amount of memory on lower-end cards. It's a shame that Gigabyte has done it here, but we're sure the core clock increase will make up for it in scenarios where the memory size doesn't have an impact on performance. In terms of bundle, Gigabyte hasn't done anything wrong, but hasn't pushed either.

There are some clear benefits to the additional 512MB of graphics memory present on Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4850 1GB graphics card in some titles, but they're not there in others. Now over time, the industry trend is definitely moving towards more graphics memory but the improvements on the Radeon HD 4850 1GB aren't quite as profound as they are on the Radeon HD 4870 1GB versions. That is something to do with the resolutions that the Radeon HD 4850 delivers an optimal gaming experience. They're not as high as they are with the Radeon HD 4870 and so the gains aren't quite as obvious which is just understandable.

Without a doubt, they are still there though and the decision to opt for a 1GB Radeon HD 4850 over a much cheaper 512MB variant is a difficult one to make. The premium works out to be approximately $50, which is quite considerable in our opinion when you see that the difference between the Radeon HD 4870 512MB and 1GB variants is only about ten percent. And we're not even referring to Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4850 1GB Multi-Core edition either, as the passive cooling solution naturally pushes the price up a little. Though we can't really say that isn't natural, as frankly it just is as you get some great value in return.

Overall the Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4850 Multi-Core version is a decent enough card backed with a good warranty that's ideally suited for those who are on a quest for absolute silence. However, we don't recommend the Radeon HD 4850 1GB for the wider market at the moment because the price increase doesn't reflect decent enough performance improvements. And should you choose to purchase the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 Multi-Core though, you will need to employ at least some airflow inside your chassis, though Gigabyte's Multi-Core cooler is better than a lot of passive coolers we've seen over the years.