Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look at the Sapphire HD4850

The first thing many of you will think when you first look at the HD4850 is how similar it looks to its distant relative: the HD3850. If you do a quick one-take, the heatsink looks the same and even the general layout of the PCB is very similar as well. Speaking of the PCB, ATI has once again used their signature red PCB for this card and carries this color into the fan assembly as well.

Aside form the obvious performance differences; the main thing that differentiates this card from the HD4870 is the fact that it uses a single slot cooler. While this may be great for those of you with a premium on space within your case and on your motherboard, it means that hot air from the heatsink will be dumped right back into your case. Single slot coolers also have a history of underperforming when compared to their dual-slot brethren.


The heatsink is somewhat dominated the single 19-bladed, 60mm fan which is used to draw in cool air before pushing it over the copper fins placed over the core. Sapphire has chosen to go with a classy carbon fiber-like patterned sticker on their card which is actually quite nice considering many ATI cards of late have been sporting stickers with either Ruby or odd looking manga characters.


The rearmost portion of the card is partially covered in what looks like one of those dead-sexy Enzotech ramsinks that water cooling aficionados love to use on their graphics cards. These small copper “towers” are used to disperse the heat generated by the VRM modules they cover.

Unlike the HD4870 which has a pair of PCI-E 6-pin power connectors, the HD4850 consumes less power and therefore only needs only one. This means the engineers were perfectly happy with the 75W a PCI-E 1.1 slot combined with the 75W a 6-pin PCI-E connector are rated to carry in order to power this card.


Looking a bit closer at the layout of the heatsink, we can see that there is a copper runner which runs almost the entire length of the card on one side. Personally, I think this is here to make the heatsink base a bit more rigid but here is a word of advice: this little piece gets bloody hot. Let your card cool down for at least 10 minutes before removing it from your case or you WILL burn yourself.

Instead of directing heat directly towards the back of your case, the heatsink on the HD4850 is slightly curved so its exhaust is directed towards the side, away from the motherboard. This suits us just fine but I would have personally liked to have seen a perforated expansion slot cover included with any card that has a single slot cooler. This would partially alleviate any worries about all the heat getting trapped in no-man’s land within your enclosure.


As with nearly all ATI cards these days, the HD4850 has a double Crossfire connector which can be used to daisy-chain one, two, three or even four of these cards together. Meanwhile, on the backside of the card we get the usual pair of DVI-D connectors as well as the video-out port. Since this card supports full audio and video out through a DVI to HDMI dongle, there really isn’t a reason to include a stand-alone HDMI connector.


There really isn’t much to see on the back of the HD4850 other than the X-shaped hold down plate mounted around the core to make sure the heatsink puts sufficient pressure on the core.


The Sapphire HD4850 is one compact card when compared to both the 9800GTX and the HD4870. It is a mere 9” long which means that it shouldn’t have a problem fitting into most mATX HTPC cases as long as they don’t require low-profile video cards.