Review of Gigabyte HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB PCI-Express GV-R485SL-1GI graphics card

Review of Gigabyte HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB PCI-Express GV-R485SL-1GI graphics card

shelley0411 | 2009-10-01 00:53:39

ummary: 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:

Gigabyte GV-R485SL-1GI
GPU	RV770 (Radeon HD 4850)
Shaders	800
Speed of GPU	640MHz
Memory	1GB GDDR3
Memory speed	960MHz (1,92GHz effective)
Bus width	256bits
Cooling system	Gigabyte Silent Cell
Video connectors	HDMI DVI-I VGA
Compatible with HDCP	yes
Compatibility with CrossFireX	yes
Slot	16 x PCI-E
Supported technologies	DirectX 10,1, Shader Model 4,1, UVD 2, ATI Stream, ATI PowerPlay, Ultra Durable VGA

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.