Gigabyte HD4850 GV-R485-512H-B Review

Makaveli - August 4, 2008
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Testing:

In order to test the Gigabyte HD 4850, I will be running it through a gauntlet of video benchmarks and recording the average frames per second to get a good idea about where this card is at. I will compare this card to a few other popular video cards as well as another HD 4850 to see where this Gigabyte 4850 stands among the competition. All of the cards will be set to bone stock frequencies and voltages, except for the EVGA GTX 260 FTW which is a factory overclocked card. All of the cards were tested with the latest drivers available at the time of this review.

Processor: Intel Q9450 Core 2 Quad 333x8
Motherboard: Gigabyte X48-DQ6
Memory: Mushkin XP2 Redline 8000 2 x 2GB 5-5-5-12
Video Card(s): Gigabyte HD 4850 w/ Catalyst 8.7
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB SATA
Optical Drive: Sony Dual Layer Burner
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Gigabyte HD 4850 675/1075MHz

This card was a bit tough to overclock because the temperatures held it back. I was able to get the card from the stock GPU clock speed of 625MHz all the way up to 675MHz. The memory went up from the stock frequency of 990MHz up to 1075MHz. Overall, that's a pretty good overclock, especially since this card was overclocked 35MHz more on the GPU and 30MHz more on the memory than the PowerColor HD 4850 that it's competing against. With an aftermarket cooler, I'm sure this card would be able to go much higher than what I got it at.