In this paper, a laser-diode pumped passively Q-switched Nd∶GdVO4 self-Raman laser is studied theoretically and experimently in detail. In the experiment, by using Nd∶GdVO4 as the gain medium and Raman medium simultaneously, using two Cr4+∶YAG crystals with different initial transmissivity as the saturable absorber, respectively, the passively Q-switched operation of the self-Raman Nd∶GdVO4 laser at 1176 nm was investigated and compared. The average power, pulse energy, pulse width and pulse repetition rate of diode pumped passively Q-switched Nd∶GdVO4 self-Raman laser at 1176 nm with respect to the incident pump power were measured. The obtained maximum output average power is 244.6 mW with respect to incident power of 5.7 W and the corresponding conversion efficiency is 4.3% with initial transmissivity of 0.91. In the theoretical part, we used the rate equations to obtain the theoretical results. In the rate equations, the Gaussian distributions of the intracavity photon densities of the fundamental and Raman lasers and the initial population inversion density were taken into account. The obtained theoretical results were in agreement with the experimental results on the whole.