Now that we’re done with the general overview of the 4800 series, let’s look at a specific card. This review will focus on the ATI Radeon HD 4850. The card that was generously supplied to us is the Diamond version. As you can see from the pictures, it’s a single slot PCI-E 2.0 card with a Diamond branded cooler. The copper cooler has a single fan to cool off the heat sink. For those with more expansion cards that sit next to a PCI-E slot, you’ll be happy to know this card won’t interfere with them at all. The heat sink extends past the cooler offering more cooling to other components of the card.
Specification wise, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 runs at a core clock speed of 625 MHz with memory at 2GHz. There are 512MB onboard. As previously mentioned the R770 contains 965 million transistors, 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, and 16 render back-ends. For all this you can pick up a card for $199 which is a pretty damn good price. The card looks to compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GT/GTS line. The review sample didn’t come with anything else other than the card though but the box does describe what is included. For starters, a component connector lets you connect to TVs with the same input. Older TVs with composite and S-Video connections is also supported with an included cable. For VGA owners, a DVI-VGA convertor is included. HDMI display owners will be pleased to see a DVI-HDMI convertor packaged in. Finally, a flexible Crossfire connector rounds out the packaged goods.
As you can see, there are two dual-linked DVI connectors and video out connector. Two Crossfire connectors are located on the top front edge of the card. The single slot card only needs one six pin power connector attached drawing a maximum of 110W. Lengthwise, it’s nice to see cards returning to a more normal length. It’s slightly shorter than the GeForce 8800 GTS and the Radeon HD 4870. You won’t have to worry about the 4850 fitting into your case. You can see the comparisons of the card lengths in the pictures below.
Feature for feature, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 is the exact same as the higher end ATI Radeon HD 4870 except for clock speed and memory type. There’s no elimination of processors or computational units for the lower end card which is great for a company to do. Many times you’ll see the lower end card get half of the hardware of the higher end cards to justify the cost but AMD went a different route this time that doesn’t gimp the card in a negative way.
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