Today we are taking a look at an ATI Radeon HD 4850 based graphics card from VisionTek. This card is a middle class card but we have seen stats that show this card should perform as well as many other high-end cards on the market. We are going to put it against the GeForce 9800 GX2 and the Radeon HD 3870 X2 video card to see what type of performance we can expect from this Radeon HD 4850 from VisionTek. All these Radeon HD 4850 based graphics card are currently following the reference design with just an updated look and feel due to the sticker on the cooler itself, and that should be the main item of difference, though we can expect in the future to see some changes. - Red&Blackness

VisionTek Radeon HD 4850 Graphics Version Review

VisionTek seem to be back at full speed again with a great looking website and this box matches the theme from the website itself. There is a big Mass Effect logo printed on the front and as always on the back you can read about the cards features. Inside the box itself you will find a small folder that contains the drivers, manual, and software for the card. In a small side compartment of the box you will have all the cables and adapters that you will need to run the card. The card looks similar to the Sapphire card but we guess there has to be some minor changes to the cards to differentiate the manufacturer.

As we can see there is a 40mm fan installed to keep this thing cool and at full load they tend to make a bit of noise, but the positive thing is that this card should even fit into a home theatre PC as the cooler is so small compared to the high-end cards. Some parts of the card are equipped with a heatsink to keep the components cool enough even under heavy load. The power connector is placed in the end of the card and don't forget to connect this or your computer might not boot or the card will not perform as it is supposed to. This is quite normal and also the case for the NVIDIA based graphics cards these days.

This graphics card comes with a core clock of 625MHz and the memory at 1986MHz according to the ATI Catalyst control center tool. The tool only allowed us to push the core to 700MHz which it did easily, we had no artifacts or lockups on the 3DMark Vantage loops we did. While the memory runs at 1986MHz we just had to try to boost it a bit more also. After some tweaking we can reveal that the memory does not go much higher than 2020MHz without causing the setup to lock up after one min of the 3DMark loop. This will give you a few more frame rates but we don't think it is needed with this card since it is very fast.

This card sells for around $200 which a bit less than the high-end cards and it still manages to perform almost aswell as the high-end cards we compared it with. It is fairly quiet for having a 40mm fan and it still manages to keep the card cool and stable even during gaming sessions. Its got enough accessories with it for you to be able to run it as a home theatre PC card even though it lacks HDMI on the card. We don't think we have to say much more, we are more than satisfied and also suprised how well this card perform. We will for sure give it our recommendations.