Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1GB Passive Review

Passive Cooling in an Extreme Environment

Some of you may be wondering: what is extremely passive cooling? Well, for these tests we put the card in a closed case with very little internal airflow.

The case is a GMC Toast which has horrible airflow characteristics to begin with but we kicked things up a notch by installing a pair of Zalman 80mm rear exhaust fans with resistors attached which means they are running at a mere 800RPMs. In addition, there is no front intake fan. We then let the CPU (an AMD 5200+) and GPU work at full load (Prime 95 for the CPU and 3DMark Batch Size Test for the GPU) for an hour with the side panel closed and hope to God nothing fries itself.

In the second test we installed the card into our Gigabyte Aurora 3D case which has airflow that is more typical of many other cases on the market. Basically, it has a front 120mm fan and a pair of rear 120mm fans all operating at 1200RPMs.

Edit: Many have been asking about room temperature which we forgot to include in this review. Room temperature for all testing was 22*C +/- 0.5*C. Our apologies.


The test within the GMC Toast case separates the men from the boys and Gigabyte’s HD 4850 1GB clearly shows that it means business. Even with next to no airflow over its fins, it was still able to keep temperatures lower than the reference board on an open test bench. Putting it into a case with more airflow only played up the piece of engineering excellence that is the Multi-Core cooler even more. Without a doubt, this is a stellar result for Gigabyte.