PowerColor submitted both their Radeon HD 4850's with 2GB for a review. Next to the unusually large framebuffer, we do notice a very important other feature; custom cooling. The cooler used is actually the ZEROtherm GX810 Gamers Edition cooler. The cooler itself is circular with 140 copper fins slapped onto a circular heatpipe.

The middle radial fan blows air through the fins and creates turbulence to move the heat from the fins to the air. The GX810 resulted in near silent operation and splendid cooling, as we'll show later.

If we look at the PCB of the card, we immediately spot that the layout is different, this is a customized PCB, hopefully that will yield some good overclocking results as well. The last thing we spot that is definitely interesting is that there are heatsinks mounted onto the memory chips. So there's definitely a lot more finesse going on oppsed to the reference cooler.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 2GB will run at a stock 625 clock frequency and comes with 2048MB GDDR3 memory (framebuffer). And here's a bit of a turn-ff, a regular 4850 will have that memory clocked at 1986 MHz, the 2GB means more wires, more latency yet also lower frequency memory. The card has it's memory clocked at 1800 MHz, which definitrely is going to effect the overall performance in a negative way as that is nearly 200 MHz.

You can expect roughly a 110 Watt peak watt power consumption. At a 249 USD introduction price, this product is a bit of an enigma as that is very close to the Radeon 4870, judge for yourself once we show you the benchmark results. Last thing I need to mention, included in the box are:

Bundled we see the following:

• Radeon HD 4850 - 2 GB frame buffer
• Manual
• Driver CD + Cyberlink powerDVD
• Crossfire connector
• CRT-DVI dongle
• DVI-HDMI dongle
• 3-way RCA analog component cable
• SVIDEO / Composite dongle
• Molex to 6-pin power converter (1x)