We already told you bits and pieces about Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and since we worked extra hard we managed to get a few scores for you. The video card is, as we said, clocked at 625MHz core and 1986MHz on the 256-bit strong GDDR3 memory and it naturally has 512MB of this precious integrated circuitry. The GPU behind the card is something that we knew as RV770 and it surprisingly has a massive 956 million transistors. This is more than forty percent more than 666 mililion, the odd number that ATI had with RV670 their previous chip. A major increase which is linked really to the increase of shader processors and the improved processing logics. - FudZilla

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Video Card Review

The chip is developed in 55nm process and, of course, it supports DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. The GPU has 16 raster operation units and it costs $199 in the US e-tail. The card itself looks almost identical to the good old Radeon HD 3850 and the cooler is actually the same. The card gets hot and reaches up to 80°C, which is acceptable for this card, but beware as you can be burned. At the same time its single slot cooler is very quiet. Being a single slot card isn't an advantage, you simply get a lot of heat that you need to take out of your case. We hope someone will make a dual slot card, would definitely get things cooler.

The card also has a single 6-pin power connector and during testing our whole testbed was happy with up to 270W, which is a great score for a Core 2 Duo X6800 system with an nForce 680i board. We didn't have too much time to test many applications but we have tested 3DMark and a few games, including the almighty Crysis. Of course, we compared this with Radeon HD 3870 X2 and derived series. We also used a few NVIDIA cards, including the GeForce 8800 GT and GeForce 9800 GTX which are the main competitors of this card. Before we forget about it, ATI is using a TeraFlop marketing gag.

ATI did a great job with this new generation. It showed us that it can get back in the game. The GeForce 9800 GTX is a tough competitor, but in some cases the $199 priced Radeon HD 4850 can win against the GeForce 9800 GTX and it clearly wins against the previous price performance king, the GeForce 8800 GT. It is great to see that ATI's anti-aliasing performance is much better and this is a no brainer, as the RV770 finally has the anti-aliasing unit working, while the RV670 did all its anti-aliasing stuff via shaders which are necessary and slower. This was the only way to make the anti-aliasing work which belongs to the past.

The card gets extremely hot, but the chip works very stable and this shouldn't concern you. This is a positive step and you can expect that the Radeon HD 4870 will be some around fifteen percent faster which would be enough to clearly beat the GeForce 9800GTX and get close to the still unavailable GeForce GTX 260. At this time this is probably the best priced performance card and we can highly recommend it, but in next days NVIDIA will make its price moves and will introduce the 55nm of the G92 which might change the game again. For $199 suggested e-tail price, we can heavily recommend it.