Headlines - PowerColor readying overclocked Radeon HD 4850 with 2GiB RAM

[HEXUS]

PowerColor's got a Radeon HD 4850 armed with 2GiB of DDR3 and pictures of the card have made their way online.

Read more.

[Breezey]

Unless Powercolour ditch that Zerotherm cooler i wont be buying one, the one on my 3850 was so loud i had to go to the purple shirt place to get a VF-900.

[DeSean]

Thumbs down for 2GB RAM on a video card. There is absolutely no point for anything less than a 30+ inch monitor, and in that case the 4850 on it's own wouldn't be powerful enough anyway.

Give me an overclocked 4870 with a better cooler and 1GB of GDDR5 and then i'll be interested.

[CK_1985]

I have to agree that 2Gb is excessive. In situations where that amount of RAM would actually be useful a mid-range card is always going to be held back by the GPU, not the memory.

The HD4850 seems to be a very capable card and it might be interesting to see if it was powerful enough to leverage any benefit from a 1Gb version, but 2Gb is just plain silly - not to mention that it will probably be very expensive.

Until some pricing numbers and benches come out I'm putting this one down to a marketing gimmick.

[Fraz]

Give me an overclocked 4870 with a better cooler and 1GB of GDDR5 and then i'll be interested.

Yeah - that is exactly what I'm interested in right now.

[koocha]

Give me a 4870X2 with 1Gb GDDR5 RAM!

[MSIC]

My first reaction - just silly RAM.

2nd reaction - there actually might be a point to it. (Please discuss if you disagree).
E.g. lets say that from the start you want to have 2 cards in crossfire, but dont want a 4870 (don't know why, but stay with me).
And that you run a game at 1920 x 1200, quite a reasonable resolution for this card.
And that a new game comes out, like the Crysis one, with large textures.
You might suppose that all those textures in the memory take up more than 512MB, let's say 850MB.
And you want to run with 4 x AA etc etc.
Each card has to be able to throw those textures around, so even if we are talking about 1 Gig and 1MB of textures in the memory per card, then a 2 Gig RAM card is just about feasible.

Am i reaching? You bet.
Is 2 Gig a reasonable amount of RAM for a 4850? No way.
Who is in charge of that company? The marketting people...

[ezri]

Stupids amounts of RAM, I really cannot see the point in that much VRAM even for very high end monitors. REALLY glad they have used a custom cooler however as the stock 4850 / 4870 one is absolutely horrific. This also must be the " 4850+ " that I was hearing about, basically AMD/ATI's answer to the 9800GTX+.

[Hicks12]

hmm, 1gb is fine but seriously unless the bus is changed to 512 or higher then it is still bottlnecked and useless, 2gb is WAY to much for a "budget" card.

[kalniel]

My first reaction - just silly RAM.

2nd reaction - there actually might be a point to it. (Please discuss if you disagree).
E.g. lets say that from the start you want to have 2 cards in crossfire, but dont want a 4870 (don't know why, but stay with me).
And that you run a game at 1920 x 1200, quite a reasonable resolution for this card.
And that a new game comes out, like the Crysis one, with large textures.
You might suppose that all those textures in the memory take up more than 512MB, let's say 850MB.
And you want to run with 4 x AA etc etc.
Each card has to be able to throw those textures around, so even if we are talking about 1 Gig and 1MB of textures in the memory per card, then a 2 Gig RAM card is just about feasible.

Am i reaching? You bet.
Is 2 Gig a reasonable amount of RAM for a 4850? No way.
Who is in charge of that company? The marketting people...

Well that's definitely part of the reasoning they're launching the X2 with a gig of memory per card, and certainly it's a good reason to go for 1gb on a 4850 and you know you will be crossfiring on a mahoose display. But yeah, you'd have to reach pretty far to justify 2GB, which would have to be pretty dense as well given the 256bit interface.

Of course, this one's just about the numbers, and if their bill of materials for a 2GB 4850 is less than for a 4870 then they'll be able to make more money from it at the same price point.

Or maybe they'll market it for GPGPU

[Oobie-]

hmm, 1gb is fine but seriously unless the bus is changed to 512 or higher then it is still bottlnecked and useless, 2gb is WAY to much for a "budget" card.

Exactly my sentiments.

[henyc]

that sounds good

[sawyen]

And for people who're working with Vista 32bit, they'll effectively end up with a max available address RAM of 1.5GB.. 2GB goes to the card.. + 512MB for the rest of the system IO..

[koocha]

And for people who're working with Vista 32bit, they'll effectively end up with a max available address RAM of 1.5GB.. 2GB goes to the card.. + 512MB for the rest of the system IO..

Aye, that be true