Gigabyte to Deliver Passively-Cooled HD 4850

There is certainly a significant amount of buzz surrounding AMD's current generation of Radeon graphics cards. As it has been proven by several benchmarks, the company’s HD 4000 series can deliver an impressive performance level, but at a much more affordable price tag, which is why major graphics card manufacturers keep developing new versions of the HD 4850, 4870 and 4870 X2 models.

 

Recent pictures indicate that Gigabyte, a graphics card manufacturer that makes use of GPUs coming from both AMD and competitor NVIDIA, is planning to release a new HD 4850-based card that will provide mainstream users with a more than decent 1GB of GDDR3 memory. One of the most interesting aspects about the new product is that, unlike the reference model, it is equipped with a custom dual-slot passive cooling solution. This system makes use of the Multi-Core cooling technology that boasts two aluminum fin arrays and four cooper heatpipes, from what we can see in the picture.

 

The solution will ultimately provide end users with one of AMD's highly successful graphics cards, cooled down by a custom passive cooling system, which will enable a high-graphics desktop gaming rig, free of the noise generated by those cards with active cooling solutions.

 

Aside from the custom cooling technology, Gigabyte decided to keep the reference card's clock rates, which means that the upcoming Radeon HD 4850 developed by the hardware manufacturer will sport a GPU speed of 625MHz, while the memory will be clocked at 1986MHz. In addition, the card's users will benefit from AMD technologies like CrossFireX and UVD 2. Furthermore, the card has native support for DirectX 10.1, which means that users will be able to play all those upcoming DirectX 10.1 computer games, which are bound to be released in the near future.