AMD's HD 4000 Series Card Sold in Hong Kong

So here's where we stand with both NVIDIA' and AMD's soon-to-be released graphics cards: we know pretty much everything about the cards and all we are expecting right now is the official treatment. But, until that happens (the Radeons are said to be the first to emerge on the market), we are still being offered extensive details about the cards. This time, the spotlight falls on AMD's HD 4850, which is reported to have been sold in Hong Kong and that also benefits from a newly released dedicated website.

Apparently, a reader of OCworkbench has managed to acquire an HD 4850 graphics card from PowerColor in Hong Kong. Also, in order to prove this statement, the reader even uploaded a picture of the receipt. The card is a 512MB DDR3 PCI-E version of AMD's latest RV770 GPU and was acquired for a total of HK$1,699, which is roughly $210. After he got his hands on the card, the buyer did what every other enthusiastic user would have done with his new acquisition, that is, he put it to a 3DMark06 benchmark test.

With a system that runs on a Core 2 Extreme X9650 CPU, clocked at 4.0GHz, the card scored no less than 15194 points. Take in consideration that the GPU was clocked at 670MHz with the memory clocked at 1100MHz.

However, even if the card is yet to be officially launched, users can also turn to the newly released teaser site for the new RV770 powered cards. Dubbed UnleashOneTera, at this point, the site doesn't offer many details on AMD's upcoming Radeons, but it does let users know that the new cards are going to come with DirectX 10.1 support and will be manufactured on a 55nm production process. Also here, users can learn of the GDDR5 support, a detail with which most of you might already be familiar.

All that's left for us to do right now is to wait a bit more until AMD finally lets loose the RV770 cards but, considering the determination of hardware journalists in being the first to test out a graphics card, we might also be seeing a full performance review moments before the cards are officially released on the market.