Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1GB Comment Thread

[Sagath]

Originally Posted by burebista

SKYMTL thanks again for your review.
Just one thing puzzles me: temperature. I have a very good friend who works in service for our big Gigabyte reseller and I just speak with him, in low airflow this card reach 110°C after 5 minutes of FUR and is throttling.
He told me that he has back in warranty more than 50 cards with temperature over 100°C.

I'm pritty sure it says in the article that there is a 120mm casefan that passes airflow directly across/over the HSF.

Even HTPC's usually have an exhaust or intake fan, so this isnt unreasonable. But no, you're not going to be able to put this card in a 1ftx1ft box, close it and leave it for 3 weeks. There needs to be -some- movement of air, somehow. Maybe its the HSF on the CPU that is helping out in SKYMTL's tests as well?

[lemonlime]

That is one impressive passive cooler!

Great review, SKY!

[Soultribunal]

Originally Posted by Sagath

I'm pritty sure it says in the article that there is a 120mm casefan that passes airflow directly across/over the HSF.

Even HTPC's usually have an exhaust or intake fan, so this isnt unreasonable. But no, you're not going to be able to put this card in a 1ftx1ft box, close it and leave it for 3 weeks. There needs to be -some- movement of air, somehow. Maybe its the HSF on the CPU that is helping out in SKYMTL's tests as well?

It really all depends on the Design of the Case you choose to put this in, and what other active cooling solutions you have laying around.
My 2600 had a Fan failure, and yet folded for 10 straight hours being passively cooled by my case fans (on a card not ment to do that).
I think it is a great alternative to having a screaming Fan plopped onto the cards.

Good review overall, I agree the price could be a bit better , however, it is still worth it for those who look for a Card such as this.



ST

[sswilson]

All I can say is "WOW"!!!!

Those are some really impressive temps for a high end passively cooled card. Even more impressive is the performance under low airflow conditions when compared to cards with active cooling.

As always, great review SKYMTL!

[poohbear]

usually your reviews are pretty thorough, but u failed to show how a stock 4850 (without passive cooling) performs in the closed case test. U compare it to all the other gpus except another 4850 w/ active cooling. Are u hiding this info from us? That was the first thing i looked for in terms of comparison to get an idea of how the passive cooling performs against other 4850s w/ active cooling, but none were included. Was this an error?

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by burebista

SKYMTL thanks again for your review.
Just one thing puzzles me: temperature. I have a very good friend who works in service for our big Gigabyte reseller and I just speak with him, in low airflow this card reach 110°C after 5 minutes of FUR and is throttling.
He told me that he has back in warranty more than 50 cards with temperature over 100°C.

That is the oddest thing I have heard actually. However, remember that there are actually TWO (maybe even three now) Gigabyte HD 4850 Multi Core cards out there. I spoke to some retail contacts here in North America and the RMA rates on these cards is actually below average.

Since I received it I have been running it in a HTPC which I also play a fair amount of games on and haven't had one issue with overly hot temperatures or throttling. As for Furmark, I don't take that as a realistic load scenario.

It should also be mentioned that this card needs SOME airflow.

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by poohbear

usually your reviews are pretty thorough, but u failed to show how a stock 4850 (without passive cooling) performs in the closed case test. U compare it to all the other gpus except another 4850 w/ active cooling. Are u hiding this info from us? That was the first thing i looked for in terms of comparison to get an idea of how the passive cooling performs against other 4850s w/ active cooling, but none were included. Was this an error?

That was only in the closed case scenario. I had an issue with data corruption on the system I was using and wasn't able to get it resolved in time to post the reference results for the closed case testing. Typically though, the fan profile on the reference card won't allow temperatures to go above 90.

[cadaveca]

Originally Posted by SKYMTL

As for Furmark, I don't take that as a realistic load scenario.

GTA4 and GRiD both give me similar temps to Furmark, on my 48701GB w/ analogue PWM.

Idle is 50c, load is 95c-98c in FarCry2, and shader domain is about 10c higher than that.


Furmark will cause throttle, and VPU recover, within a few seconds. But so will GRiD...just not as fast...and without the vpu recover. GTA4 will take about 30 minutes before VPU recover.

So, yeah, Furmark is far quicker to bring those temps up, but it's not the only app that can do so.


So, two comments here...that there "MultiCore" cooler seems damn fantastic...secondly, this Sapphire cooler seems like GARBAGE!!!


Thanks for the review SKY, I think I need one for my audio rig.

[sbarash]

I had a fanless 9700 back in the day (think it was a Gigabyte). Had it in a tower case, but the damn thing was so heavy thanks to all the additional copper, that it had serious PCB sag that eventually caused it to become unreliable.

I'm wondering how much more this baby weighs than a reference 4850, and what effect gravity + heating / cooling + time would have while mounted in a tower case...

Great review, thanks

-Stephen

[darksideleader]

Hey, SKYMTL what was the ambient tempture of the tests?

Thanks.