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PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 512MB Video Card
Introduction
There have been no fewer than fourteen video card launches this year. Seventeen if you count launches globally, and almost thirty if you include integrated video. Despite fast sales, the harried, bulky mass of the upgrade market has thrown its hands in the air, waiting for the launches to settle, to see the card or cards that stay standing. Many people, justly, bought a 9600 GT. Some people, early adopters, got burned by their now-cheap 9800s. ATI, everyone said, wait for ATI. Which is over, and the HD 3850 stands vicious. The 3870 is sold out everywhere. Intel's success has directly benefited ATI and AMD, who have made cards that excel in CrossFire, with efficient cards that have really made multi-GPU a reality. Interestingly, there seem to be few, if any drastic, architecture changes for HD 4000. It's all scale down, add more. PowerColor, a long-time board partner, shows just how well this strategy pays out for the HD 4850. The Card & Bundle Even side-by-side, this card looks just like a 3850. That's really superb, because not only was its predecessor small, clean, and fast, it was also quiet. The sticker's adornment is a busty, armored model in Viking chic. But it's a stock card, with the same design that you'd get with any 4850 currently available.         Included is the quick-start manual, a CrossFire bridge, a component breakout adapter, a composite adapter, a VGA adapter, and an HDMI adapter. The is also some CyberLink video editing software. Power regulation is four-phase for the GPU and one-phase for the memory. Most of the capacitors are aluminum-capped, and the power connection points towards the front of the case. There are two CF tabs at the top for CrossFireX. The back of the card shows almost no PCB; it's silvered from the explosion of resistors controlling God knows what. There are no blanks on the component side for extra memory. There's barely enough space for the "do not trash" international pictogram.
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Test Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
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