Summary: Gigabyte sent us one of their newest cards with interesting technologies such as “Ultra Durable VGA” and their passive cooler solution “Silent Cell”.

A couple of weeks back, we reviewed the GV-N285OC-2GI (NVIDIA GTX 285), a card placed at the “high end” extreme of the very wide range of GPUs available in the market.  Just last week we looked at a middle segment card from Zotac, the “Zotac GTS 250 AMP! 1GB“. The time has come to look at another middle segment card, this time with a GPU from AMD ATI.

INTRODUCTION

I am very excited to start working on this review, mainly because it features two exciting technologies which are unique to some of Gigabyte’s cards, the “Silent Cell” passive cooling technology and the “Ultra Durable VGA” (UDV) technology. Let’s take a look at the specifications:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Gigabyte has clearly put in a little extra effort on the retail box for this card. They are flirting with us consumers with their aggressive graphics silk printed on the box. As you can see they have placed a small window on top of the front side of the box, where you can preview the Silent Cell heatsink.

When opening the box, we found the graphics card itself secured tightly in dampening foam as you can see from the image above. The accessories are found below the white dampening foam and we were not disapointed by the bundle Gigabyte provides with this package. Aside from the graphics card, Gigabyte have included a CrossFire bridge, a power adapter for feeding double molex to PCI-E pin (6 pins), a VGA-DVI adapter, a composite video adapter and of course the manual and CDs with drivers and applications.

GIGABYTE GV-R485SL-1GI IN DETAIL

Without a doubt, the most interesting thing about this card is its “Silent Cell” heatsink. It’s based on three 3 heatpipes of pure copper. The base of the heatsink is also based on copper but the heatsink itself is made of aluminum. One curious think we noted about this heatsink was its robustness, normally these kind of heatsinks are very fragile, but the Silent Cell is quite robust.

As you can see from the images, the heatsink covers the PCB almost completely, but it is actually only attached to the GPU chip and not the memory modules. Altogether we have 8 modules of 128MB to make the total of 1GB. The memories are Samsung 1ns, which offers a nominal frequency of up to 1GHz, although Gigabyte don’t run them at that speed which means we have a little margin for improvements.

Another outstanding feature of this card is its PCB, which is built upon the “Ultra Durable VGA” principles. The UDV technology uses almost double the normal amount of copper, which helps better lead the electricity and also improves on the cooling and general stability of the card. On the PCB we also find the 6 pin PCI-E  power connector and the connector for CrossFire mode.

Other connectors on this card are the VGA connector, the DVI connector and the HDMI connector. These three covers all you can think of both now and for the future. Of course it’s a question of saving money but it’s my opinion that all graphics cards should come with this setup of connectors.

THE TEST EQUIPMENT

OK, enough about the specs, let’s get this test going. But first, here’s the test setup we used:

We used three different resolutions, as well as 2 different configurations, one without filters and another with filters. In all scenarios we set the graphics quality setting to max. We also overclocked the CPU to 3,5GHz (250×14) and left the memory to 1000MHz.

You can view screen shots from our settings above.

BENCHMARK RESULTS

Just to get a grip of what the above graphs actually tells us, we can compare it to the result we had in our Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 review. As you can see the HD 4770 is a clear winner in 3D Mark 06, whereas in Furmark and Lightsmark Gigabyte HD 4850 has an advantage. We will just have to see what happens in the real gaming scenarios below.

GAME TESTING PART 1

In this first part of the game testing, it becomes obvious that Gigabyte GV-R485SL-1GI is superior to the HD 4770. This might also indicate that the 1GB of RAM on the Gigabyte card is more important for the performance than the GDDR5 memory on the HD 4770 card.

GAME TESTING PART 2

The second part of the game testing includes more demanding games which really puts the card to the test. Just as we noted in the part 1, the amount of memory proves important and gives the HD 4850 a slight advantage. But overall these two cards are more or less equals in these games.

As a general conclusion we have to say that Gigabyte was right to equip the HD 4850 with 1GB of memory. In very demanding games and when using filters, the extra performance is needed. I therefore conclude that with a tighter budget, if you have to choose, then go with the Radeon HD 4850 with 1GB of memory rather than a Radeon HD 4770 with 512MB of GDDR5.

RESULTS OF THE OVERCLOCKING IN GAMES AND BENCHMARKS