Passively cooled 1GB HD4850 by Gigabyte

Gigabyte presents a new passively cooled model of the Radeon HD4850 graphics card. The card features 1GB of GDDR3 memory, twice the amount a reference HD4850 has. The RV770 GPU that lies under the heatsink, runs at a 625 MHz frequency, meaning it is just as fast as the original actively cooled single slot version of the card. 

To transfer heat off the GPU, Gigabyte uses a design with two independent aluminum heatsinks. Two copper heatpipes run from the core to each heatsink for a better heatspread over the entire surface. The memory chips, not cooled by the two heatsinks, are clocked at 1986 MHz. 

Passively cooled HD4850 by Gigabyte, image source: Tech Connect

The silent Gigabyte HD4850 does require some extra power, coming from the additional PEG6 connector. Thanks to the RV770 videochip, the card is able to handle DirectX 10.1, UVD2 and 7.1 channel audio through HDMI. The GPU takes up two PCI brackets and will cost about 170 Euro. 

Tags: ddr3 hd4850 hdmi heatpipe radeon directx

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