Sapphire HD 4850
Sapphire HD 4850
The Sapphire 4850 isn’t a particularly striking card. It has a relatively standard single slot cooler with a red coaxial fan at one end. The only thing that looks different from the last generation of ATI GPUs is new design heatsink over the PWM area.
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The fan on the card has an ATI Radeon sticker at it’s centre and draws air from in-front (beneath when the card is mounted) and forces it over the large, copper, internal heatsink.
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This air is then exhausted out the rear of the cooler, but this is then just blown back into the case; no exhaust vents here.
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Interestingly though, unlike most nVidia cards, ATI have chosen not to have the fan draw air across the front mounted PWM heatsink.
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Near the exhaust area of the cooler are two Crossfire bridge connectors, this allows for more than one GPU of the same type to be connected together for increased performance, though it seems like this practice is being shunned slightly with the massive performance gains seen with ATI’s X2 range of cards.
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At the rear of the 4850 we have the standard connectors; twin DVI ports and a single S-Video connector.
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The back of the 4850 features a single low profile backing plate with tiny screws.
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