Guru 3D has gotten their hands on a yet unannounced Radeon HD 4850 card from PowerColor with no less than 2GB of GDDR3 memory and PCS cooling. It appears as if the card is still using the reference design, but it's a bit hard to tell, although due to the ZeroTherm cooler, PowerColor has added heatsinks to the memory and power regulation circuitry.

The downside of this card is that although it has loads of memory, it's clocked 200MHz slower than on the 512MB cards, as the 512MB cards have the memory clocked at 2GHz while the PowerColor 2GB version is only clocked at 1.8GHz. The GPU is clocked at 625MHz, which is the same on the 512MB cards.

The end result of this is that the 512MB card outperforms the 2GB card in just about every single test, which once again goes to show that more memory isn't always better. The differences are quite small, on average between 3-5 fps, sometimes less, but even at very high resolutions, the extra memory just doesn't seem to add any performance benefit to the card. Out of all the games tested, the 2GB card only comes out on top at 2,560x1,600 in Race Driver - Grid.

At a $50 (€32) price premium, this isn't a particularly bad deal, but it seems a little bit pointless. Hopefully, the retail cards will ship with faster memory, but we very much doubt it.

You can find the revview here.