ATI have been gradually falling behind in the GPU race with NVIDIA seemingly in an unassailable position after the release of the G80. The GeForce 8800 GTX series really dominated the market, with the hilariously titled next gen GeForce 9 series again pulling ahead of ATI. It seems though, ATI's strategy was not to dominate NVIDIA from the top down, but rather to sneak some cards onto the market that did very well on price whilst delivering very good value performance. The Radeon HD 3850 was a great example of this and put the proverbial ATI cat amongst the not so happy, to be proverbial, NVIDIA shaped pidgeons. Now ATI have announced, that they are releasing their next generation. - Overclock3D

ASUS Extreme AH4850 512MB Graphics Card Review

The Radeon HD 4850 is loosely based on ATI's previous generation RV600 GPU, except ATI have put this gen on some rather serious steroids. Boasting a large sounding 800 shader units and with a boosted core clock to the Radeon HD 3850. As you can see, the Radeon HD 4850 fits into a nice slot between the GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce 8800 GTS, price wise. This means that ATI is again aiming at enthusiasts who really want that bang for buck in their graphics card. It also means that the video card had better do a pretty good job performance wise as this is a very competitive price bracket.

The RV770 chip has the same shader processors as the previous generation, but ATI have bolstered these up to 800 in total. This increases the transistor count on the Radeon HD 4850 up to 956 million, built using 55nm process. ATI's awesome memory ringbus technology stays as well, pumping through the memory bandwidth. The core clock has been upped to 625MHz and the memory clock to 1986MHz, which should also improve the pixel pushing abilities of the little card. Now ASUS are a very good company for making very well packaged products with hugely oversized boxes, though it is a bit smaller this time.

The reference card we have is packed into a single slot cooler made up of copper with a fairly large fan for a card of this size. The heatsink extends over the power regulating circuitry and covers all of the memory on the card. We are actually impressed with the design of the heatsink, but more on that later. The reference card really is very slim here and obviously the cooler does do its job as it becomes very hot during use. The card is powered from a 6-pin PCI Express power dongle and will not boot at all without this inserted. The stock cooling on this card is pretty good, although perhaps a little immaterial.

Frankly, ATI are really aiming at the middle market share with the Radeon HD 4850, and it's fair to say that they've definitely captured this market with style. The Radeon HD 4850 is already set at $199 and even $179 for the lower models, and this is a very important price point in a very tight market. The anti-aliasing performance was a big downfall of the last generation, but ATI have fixed this issue and caused enthusiasts a real headache. NVIDIA have been forced to drop the GeForce 9800 GTX in price very close to the $199 mark and some partners have done so, the Radeon HD 4850 is a real player for your hard earned cash.

Using only the the ATI Overdrive facility built into the driver control panel, the maximum overclock we were able to obtain from the Radeon HD 4850 was 750MHz on the core and 2240MHz on the memory. Going any higher than this caused random system freezes, overheating and visual corruption issues during testing. Personally, we like to edge a little for the underdog, and since NVIDIA blatantly started churning out G80 re-runs, we have almost been egging ATI on. Finally we see a graphics card that really performs and really gives NVIDIA food for thought.