Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1GB (GV-R485MC-1GH)

Heat

Because the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1GB is passively cooled with Gigabyte's Multi-Core technology, we decided against testing the card's overclocking capabilities. The card isn't designed with that in mind in our opinion and it's instead targeted at the user who is building a silent, but powerful gaming PC that'll probably sit under a decent-sized HDTV in the living room.

With this in mind, we focused our efforts on finding out if Gigabyte's passive cooler was up to the task. We not only subjected the card to the standard set of gaming benchmarks we run on every card, but we also got on with what we've now coined the Crysis Crunch.

Now, the Crysis Crunch is exactly what it sounds like and I'm sure you can spot the similarities with the Credit Crunch the world's financial markets are going through right now. It's designed to crush any graphics card cooling solution that simply isn't good enough.

In simple terms, we loop Crysis for several hours and see how the cooler holds up without any additional cooling. During the test, we monitor the heatsink's fin temperatures with a digital thermometer to gauge how hot the card itself is getting and to check that the heatsink is, indeed, doing its job.

With the Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH, the card continued to run without any airflow in an ambient temperature of 26 to 27°C at over 100 degrees. The maximum temperature we recorded on the fins was a finger-melting 98.7°C and, according to RivaTuner, the core hit 106°C during our stress test. We then left the card to settle down and we recorded an idle core temperature about an hour later of 62°C, while the fins were a respectable 57°C.

Despite these rather extreme temperatures, the card kept running and didn't crash - we were pretty impressed with this result considering it was designed to essentially cook the card until it fell over. Gigabyte's Multi-Core cooling solution certainly seems to be up to the task even in environments lacking airflow completely.

What's more, when we tested the card with simulated case cooling from a side vent, the Multi-Core cooling solution kept the GPU incredibly cool - the core idled at just 35°C and after an hour of load the highest temperature we recorded was 48°C. The fin temperatures were also incredibly low at 27°C and 36°C respectively.

Final Thoughts...

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. Over time, the industry trend is definitely moving towards more graphics memory - that trend has existed for years now and it's not going to change any time soon - but the improvements on the Radeon HD 4850 1GB aren't quite as profound as they are on the Radeon HD 4870 1GB.

That is something to do with the resolutions that the Radeon HD 4850, in general, 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. 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 £30 or 25 percent, which is quite considerable in our opinion when you see that the difference between the Radeon HD 4870 512MB and 1GB variants is only 10 percent. And we're not even referring to Gigabyte's GV-R485MC-1GH Radeon HD 4850 1GB here either, as the passive cooling solution naturally pushes the price up a little - it'd be unfair to make that comparison because we believe the passive cooler does add some genuine value here.

Overall then, Gigabyte's GV-R485MC-1GH 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 in more than a few select titles at some rather extreme settings - that's not a fault of Gigabyte's, it's merely because of the general price difference between 512MB and 1GB variants of the Radeon HD 4850.

Should you choose to purchase the GV-R485MC-1GH though, there is one recommendation we need to make: you'll need to employ at least some airflow inside your chassis because the heat needs to be moved somewhere in the long run even though Gigabyte's Multi-Core cooler is better than a lot of passive coolers we've seen over the years.

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