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The Radeon HD 4850 have been getting very good reviews around the globe lately, but it's been let down by the high temperatures and excess heat it produced. Manufacturers such as Sapphire managed to combat this by introducing their Toxic series, which involves removing the stock cooler and installing a third party cooler instead such as a Zalman GPU cooler. It worked wonders for the card ... with lower temperatures during idle and load.

Gigabyte decided to do the same ... but only this time they used their own in-house designed, fanless solution featuring their "Multi-Core" Cooling technology. This new cooling technology is very unique and involves utilising a series of ultra-thin layered fins with nodes of copper to add more cooling points on the heat pipes. This increaes the heat conduction ratio and thus enhancing overall thermal performance. According to Gigabyte their "Multi-Core" cooling technology can deliver as much as 76% in thermal efficiency, reducing temperatures by upto 15 degrees Celisus.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH graphics card. It's powered by ATI's already proven and powerful Radeon HD 4850 (RV770) GPU featuring 55nm technology, upto 480 processor streams, 1Gb of DDR3 ram, as well as supporting DX10.1, HDMI, HDCP and CrossfireX. To add to this, Gigabyte have also overclocked the GPU core slightly, from the standard clock of 625Mhz to 640Mhz, and they've done the same for the memory too ... from the satndard clock of 900Mhz to 960Mhz.

It's a decent card and should perform in-line with other Radeon HD 4850s on the market. However, what makes this card different is the fanless "Multi-Core" cooling technology which Gigabyte have included. It should appeal to a lot of gamers who cherish silence as well as some HTPC enthusiasts.

In our tests we'll be benchmarking the Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH with several GPU intensive DX10 games ... with both 4xAA and 16xAF options enabled, as well as your usual 3D Mark 2005, 2006 and Vantage tests. Our test rig includes an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ default 2.4Ghz, Gigabyte GA-X48 DQ6 (X48) motherboard, Kingston HyperX DDR2 PC2-9200 2Gb Kit, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245B LCD monitor. All-in-all, it's a decently spec'd system for DX10 gaming.

OK, let's not waste any more time an take a look a closer look at the Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH graphics card ...