We removed the video card cooler to take a look. As you can see on Figure 4, the cooler is 100% made of copper, which is great, as this material dissipates heat better than aluminum.

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Figure 4: Video card cooler.

On Figure 5 you can see the video card without its cooler. It uses eight 512-Mbit Qimonda HYB18H512321BF-10 GDDR3 chips, making its 512 MB memory (512 Mbits x 8 = 512 MB). These chips have a maximum real clock rate of 1 GHz (1 ns, 2 GHz performance), so on this video card they are practically running on top of their maximum spec.

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Figure 5: Sapphire HD 4850 with its cooler removed.

On Figure 6 you can see all accessories and CDs/DVDs that come with this video card, which includes a 2 GB USB drive (limited time offer). With the accessories that come with this card you can convert the video output to VGA, HDMI, component video and composite video, plus the DVI and S-Video connectors already present on the product.

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Figure 6: Accessories.

This video card comes with three games inside a DVD called “Ruby ROM 1.1”: Call of Juarez, Dungeon Runners and Stranglehold. Programs that come with this video card include CyberLink DVD Suite (PowerProducer 4, PowerDirector 5 Express, Power2GO 5.5, Mediashow 3 and trial versions of PowerBackup 2.5, PowerDVD Copy and LabelPrint 2), Cyberlink Power DVD 7,3DMark06 Full, EarthSim and GameShadow.

Let’s now compare the Radeon HD 4850 specifications to its main competitors.