A Closer Look

Even though the heatsink base looks like copper, it is just aluminum with some color on top.


This piece of metal cools the eight memory chips it is attached securely by screws going through from the back side of the card.



The reference design HD 4850 cards all used a three phase power design which tended to get quite hot. HIS went with the four-phase route which distributes the load over more components.


Like all other HD 4850 versions, the HIS HD 4850 IceQ4 requires one six pin PCI-Express power connector.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QH-HJ08. With 0.8 ns latency they should be good for at least 1250 MHz.


We already know the RV770 graphics processor from the HD 4850, HD 4870 and HD 4870 X2. It is made at TSMC Taiwan in a 55 nm process and has 956 million transistors.