A Closer Look

AMD's cooler is made of Copper and cools GPU, memory and voltage regulators. If you compare the baseplate of MSI's cooler to the baseplate of the PowerColor card you can see small differences.


All HD 4850 cards support CrossFireX for up to four GPUs working together. This allows you to easily scale performance in case you need more power under the hood.


A single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector delivers power to the card. The card will only work with external power connected.


The GDDR3 chips are made by Qimonda (formerly Infineon) and have the model number HYB18H512321BF-10. The chips are rated at 1.0 ns (= 1000 MHz) which is pretty much what we saw during overclocking. You will see the much faster GDDR5 only on the HD 4870 which will be announced on the 25th.


Unlike the NVIDIA GT200, the AMD RV770 GPU is not that big with a die size of 256 mm². Just like all other ATI GPUs the GPU is made at TSMC in a 55nm process.