Sapphire HD 4850 512 MB 100245L Own PCB Design Review

Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of AMD internal overclocking software and our benchmarking suite.



The final overclocks of our card are 741 MHz core (19% overclock) and 1089 MHz Memory (10% overclock). Given the low price of the card both overclocks are excellent because it offers free extra performance waiting to be unlocked.

Temperatures

Sapphire successfully lowered the idle and load temperatures compared to the AMD Radeon HD 4850 reference design. This improvement, however, comes at a cost. As mentioned before, the fan noise of the card is quite loud. The more sensible solution would have been a quieter fan with slightly higher temperatures.