The Card

The Radeon HD4850 is a sizable card but not monstrous.  Measuring 9.25 inches in length it is shorter than many other high end cards on store shelves.  The card is also a single slot graphics solution that appears to be spot on with the ATi reference design.  This design being an encased acrylic shroud covering a multi-fin copper convection apparatus.

  

A turbine bladed 60mm fan provides the fresh air intake for the acrylic shroud with a copper pin grid heatsink over the rear MOSFET and power capacitors positioned at the card's rear.  Looking closely out back we find a lone 6-pin PCI-E power connection point.

  

Moving to the front of the card we see that Force3D has chosen to adorn it's HD4850 with ATi's Ruby.

The shroud exhausts warm air out at a 45 degree angle from the rear I/O.  This is a disadvantage of single slot cards since to properly expel warm air out of a case you have to have an open vented slot in which to do it with.  Not possible with a single slot card.  However, the flip side is that being a single slot graphics solution, the HD4850 can easily be adapted into a small HTPC.  With its Blu-Ray and HD Video capabilities it should do so quite well in that capacity.  Looking at the exhaust a bit closer you can see the copper convection fins that appear to offer a good deal of surface area for cooling.  We'll definitely be getting to that later.

  

Pulling the large cooler off of the HD4850's PCB we get a better look at the all copper construction.  You can see that the 60mm fan also breaths a bit from the underside via a small cutout.  This will allow some ventilation underneath the cooler between its contact points.  Very smart.

  

A couple of shots of the HD4850 GPU and the Qimonda GDDR3 memory used with Force3D's card.  The GPU comes in with the ATi reference clock speed of 625MHz.  The Qimonda GDDR3 is clocked at 1986MHz (993MHz x 2).  Memory is one of the big differences between the HD4850 and the HD4870 as the HD4870 comes packing GDDR5.  The cores are similar in architecture with the exception of clock speeds.

  

Here's the connection end.  Two DVI and a composite out in between should be enough for the average Joe or Joann.

 

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Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card
Pg. 3 - Installation/Noise/Test Bed
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion