The battle between AMD and NVIDIA for the hearts, minds, and the disposable income of PC enthusiasts is starting to get scrappy. First, AMD scheduled their press event to distract folks from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series launch, which NVIDIA subsequently pulled forward. Perhaps in retaliation, the green team then divulged plans to unleash a faster version of its GeForce 9800 GTX. This GeForce 9800 GTX+ will sell for only $229, dropping the vanilla GeForce 9800 to $199 conveniently stepping on the price point of AMD's next-gen Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. And let it be outmaneuvered, and because cards are actually available for sale already, AMD has decided to lift the curtains. - TechReport

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Video Card Review

While we're limited in what we can say about the Radeon HD 4850 and its shiny new graphics processor, the card itself is fair game. This particular card comes from Sapphire, which provides a sticker for the reference design's cooling shroud. As you can see, the card is a single slot design, just like the Radeon HD 3850 that came before it. And thanks to its svelte cooler, the Radeon HD 4850 won't cannibalize adjacent expansion slots. The slim design should also make it easier for users to assemble three and four way CrossFire configurations. The Radeon HD 4850 has only a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector.

The Radeon HD 4850 features a core clock speed of 625MHz, and it's equipped with 512MB of GDDR3 memory running at nearly 2GHz. With a little reverse math and memory running at 1996MHz, it looks like the Radeon HD 4850's path to memory is 256-bit wide. It's been a long time since an ATI Radeon was the graphics card of choice at the all important $199 price point, but the Radeon HD 4850 looks like it might have the title locked up. The current GeForce 9800 GTX is simply no match for AMD's latest mid-range offering, and NVIDIA's surprise, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ version, has quite a bit of ground to make up.

We will have a full work-up of the GTX+ soon, of course, but the cards only just arrived this morning. While it would be hasty to draw too many conclusions before we have a better grasp of the GeForce 9800 GTX+'s performance, and before AMD fully reveals its Radeon HD 4000 series, one thing is certain the graphics war looks more competitive now than it's been in a very long time. That's ultimately a good thing for consumers, especially since AMD looks keen to take the fight aggressively to mid-range products that most consumers can afford and what really is the market to make money.