Introduction and Early Peek

The AMD Radeon HD 4000-series of GPUs is one of those company "secrets" that no one actually tries to hide.  AMD has gone out of their way to discuss these products without exactly disclose all the details - just this week we were at a "Cinema 2.0" event AMD hosted that described the architecture without detailing the product.  The scheduled release for the RV770 parts, the HD 4850 and HD 4870, were scheduled for just this next week.

Well someone in Europe didn't get the memo, cards went on sale and thus our NDA on HD 4850s was lifted.  The result?  You cannot get a very quick preview of HD 4850 performance.  We aren't supposed to be talking about the architecture, or the HD 4870, so let's just cut to the chase...

The MSI Radeon HD 4850 512MB

The sample cards we received were from MSI - though all the initial Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards are going to be essentially identical to reference designs.

The lower priced RV770 card is built with a single slot cooler design but it gets DAMN HOT!

As we have come to expect from AMD now, the HD 4850 comes with two dual-link DVI outputs, an HDTV output and HDMI output support courtesy of the DVI-to-HDMI adapters included.

The Radeon HD 4850 requires just a single 6-pin PCIe power connector.

The back of the card is bare of memory though there TONS of resistors to be seen...