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Published in Graphics

Gainward's HD 4850 Golden Sample

by on25 August 2008

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Preview: Gainward's first non-reference ATI card

Gainward has been an Nvidia AIB 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. Today, we take a quick look at Gainward's first non-reference ATI card, the HD 4850 Golden Sample.

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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 1,100MHz (2.2GHz). This is a nice factory overclock, if you consider that the reference card works at 625MHz for the core and 1,986MHz for memory.

The card features the 3+1 VRM design, and unlike the reference HD 4850 which uses the 6-pin power connector, this one comes with an 8-pin power connector. The extra power is there just to keep the card stable and to make that impressive overclock possible, but we will check it out closer in our detailed review. The card is still based on ATI's great RV770 Pro GPU which is built in 55nm manufacturing technology and has 800 shader processors.

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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.

This card scores P6330 in 3DMark Vantage and it scores 11542 in 3DMark06. We will have a detailed review soon. so stay tuned.


Last modified on 29 August 2008
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