Diamond Radeon HD4850

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July 7, 2008 by Lawrence Lee

Product	Diamond Radeon HD 4850 PCI-E Video Card
Manufacturer	Diamond Multimedia
Street Price	~US$190

ATI's Radeon HD 3850/3870 brought a significant improvement to their discrete graphics card lineup. Not only did they perform well in 3D games, they were the first cards to support full hardware decoding for H.264 and VC-1 video. In addition, power efficiency was improved substantially — the HD 3850 for example used literally half the power of its predecessors on load, and almost four times less when idle. With the lower power draw, the amount of heat that required dissipating decreased proportionally, resulting in GPUs that were relatively easy to cool — even passively if an Accelero S1 was used to replace the stock cooler.

Fast-forward 8 months, and ATI's got a whole new batch of cards, this time the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870, utilizing the new RV770 core. These cards feature increased memory bandwidth, more stream processors and other improvements to make them competitive with nVidia's higher end offerings. Also, UVD has been slightly improved and the HDMI audio output supports 7.1 sound.

Presenting the Diamond Radeon HD 4850.

Today we're looking at Diamond Multimedia's version of the Radeon HD 4850. Diamond may be a new name to some, but they've been around since way back, producing PCI-E, AGP, PCI, and even ISA video cards based on nVidia or ATI GPUs (depending on the era). They currently also produce TV tuners and sound cards. The Diamond Radeon HD 4850 uses a cooling solution that looks virtually identical to the reference design, which is widely used by many card makers. This suggests that the acoustic and thermal performance of the Diamond can apply to a large number of Radeon HD 4850 cards in the marketplace.

Diamond's HD 4850 comes in rather flimsy black box.

Diamond Radeon HD 4850: Specifications (from the product web page)
PERFORMANCE
GPU	HD 4850
ASIC Core	RV 770
Core Clock	625
BUS	PCI Express x16
Ports	2 Dual-Link DVI,Video Out [S-Video, Composite, HDTV]
Stream Processors	800
MFG Process	55nm fabrication process
Transistor Count	666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication proces
Cooling	Active - FanCooler
MEMORY
Memory Clock	993
Memory Configuration	16Mx32
Memory Type	GDDR3
Memory Bandwidth	147GB/sec
Memory Size	512MB
Memory Interface	256-bit
RAMDAC	400 Mhz
Video Quality
Cooling	Active - FanCooler
Standard Slot Solution	SINGLE
CrossFire	CrossFire X
QuadFire Support	YES
Direct-X	8.0-9.0-10.0-10.1
Open GL	OpenGL 2.1
Vide Acceleration	MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264
Max Resolution Analog	1600 x 1200
Max Resolution Digital	2560 x 1600
HDR F.Point Rendering	128
HDR Integer	16-bit integer or floating point
Anti Aliasing Modes	Smoothvision HD + Adaptive AA.Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing
Antisotropic Modes	2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
Texture Support	Texture filtering features 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel) 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering Bicubic filtering sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma) Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
Pixel Operation	TBA
Display Support
HDTV	YES
HDMI	HDMI compliance / HDCP ready
HDMI MODE	DONGLE
Native Display Support	10-bit
3D Resolution	2560 x 1600
TV-OUT Resolution	720
Dual Display support	Hydravision 4
Holywood Q.VIDEO	Yes

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