Gainward today announced the arrival of its Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870. Yep, that's right, this long running NVIDIA-exclusive partner is now best buds with the Red team, and no doubt less popular with the Green team.
The news might provoke a little grimace from the folks at NVIDIA, but it isn't all that surprising. Palit, who acquired Gainward a few years back, have been providing retail cards for both NVIDIA and AMD for as long as we can remember.
It was always only a matter of time before Gainward began to do likewise, and the performance-per-pound of AMD's Radeon HD 4000 series is likely to have been the product that gave Gainward the required nudge.
So, let's take a look at the cards shall we?
Gainward Radeon HD 4850
Gainward Radeon HD 4870
The red kinda suits Gainward, we feel. Sadly, the cards aren't anything out of the ordinary, they're in keeping with AMD's reference designs and the standard specifications are as follows:
Specifications |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Graphics chip |
ATI® HD4870 |
ATI® HD4850 |
|||
Core clock |
750MHz |
600Mhz |
|||
Memory type |
GDDR5 |
GDDR3 |
|||
Memory Size / bandwidth |
512MB 256bit |
512MB 256bit |
|||
Memory clock |
3.6GHz (900MHz*4) |
1986MHz (993*2) |
|||
Output |
2 * Dual-link DVI-I |
2 * Dual-link DVI-I |
|||
Slot |
2 Slots, PCI-Express 2.0 |
1 Slot, PCI-Express 2.0 |
|||
New Technologies |
ATI® CrossFire X™ technology |
ATI® CrossFire X™ technology |
|||
Official press release: Gainward Rocks & Shocks the mainstream gaming world with the new ATI HD4870/HD4850 graphics cards
