CPU3D.com

Gigabyte's fanless and silent "Multi-Core" Cooling system finally gets to be featured on their Radeon HD 4850 graphic cards. After seeing it work so well on their Geforce 9600GT, it was only natural to see this special cooling technology featured on their Radeon HD 4850 graphic cards too.

Overall, the performance of the Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH was on par with the other Radeon HD 4850s. It produced very good results in all our tests. However, in some benchmarks it fell behind ever so slightly, but the difference was very marginal. I guess you have to compromise, and sacrifice a little performance in preference to the total silence and lower temperature that this card offers.

We put this card through 8 hours of heavy DX10 gaming and we were surprised to see that the "Multi-Core" cooloing technology was wroking flawlessly, with temperatures averaging around 48 degrees Celsius. It's definitely much cooler than what you would get from a stock cooler which can be in excess of 70 degrees Celsius. So, this is excellent news for the gaming enthusiast who love silence, but expect good performance from a card that won't heat up the system like a radiator.

Noise level ... well, it's perfectly silent! It has no fans. Again, this is ideal for HTPC enthusiasts who wants a high performance mainstream card that offers all the benefits of HDCP, HDMI and excellent video features from a Radeon HD 4850, with the added bonus of silence.

The 1Gb of DDR3 ram onboard is plenty for even the most demanding of mutlimedia/HTPC users, and it's more than enough for high resolution DX10 gaming.

Pricewise, the Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH is expected to cost around £110 ($200), it's not the cheapest Radeon HD 4850 around, but you do get 1Gb of DDR3 ram and Gigabyte's fanless "Multi-Core" cooling technology.

Final words. The Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH with it's fanless "Multi-Core" cooling technology is ideal for any gamer and HTPC enthusiast who cherish silence. The "Multi-Core" cooling technology really lowers the GPU temperatures by as much as 15-20 degrees Celsius over a standard stock cooler. The overall performance is on par with other Radeon HD 4850s, so it's all good here ... but for the hardcore enthusiasts, you might want to look elsewhere.

Pros:
 - Radeon HD 4850
 - Good performance
 - Very good thermal performance
 - 1Gb of DDR3 ram
 - Latest technology DX10.1
 - 800 Processor Streams
 - HDMI, HDCP, CrossfireX ready

Cons:
 - Dual slot solution
 - No bundled games

 OVERALL SCORE
8/10