There have been no fewer than fourteen video card launches this year. Seventeen if you count launches globally, and almost thirty if you include integrated video. Despite fast sales, the harried, bulky mass of the upgrade market has thrown its hands in the air, waiting for the launches to settle, to see the card or cards that stay standing. Many people, justly, bought a GeForce 9600 GT. Some people, early adopters, got burned by their now-cheap GeForce 9800's. Wait for ATI and the Radeon HD 3850 board edition stands vicious. Intel's success has directly benefited ATI and AMD, who have made video cards that excel in CrossFire, with efficient cards that have really made multi-GPU a reality. - TechLounge

PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 512MB Graphics Review

Interestingly, there seem to be few, if any drastic, architecture changes for the Radeon HD 4800 series. It's all scale down, add more. PowerColor, a long time board partner, shows just how well this strategy pays out for the Radeon HD 4850. Even side by side, this card looks just like a Radeon HD 3850. That's really superb, because not only was its predecessor small, clean, and fast, it was also quiet. The sticker's adornment is a busty, an armored model in Viking chic. But it's a stock card, with the same design that you'd get with any Radeon HD 4850 currently available, as all are following the reference design.

Power regulation is 4-phase for the GPU and one-phase for the memory. Most of the capacitors are aluminum capped, and the power connection points towards the front of the case. There are two CrossFire tabs at the top for CrossFireX support. The back of the video card shows almost no PCB, it's silvered from the explosion of resistors controlling God knows what. There are no blanks on the component side for extra memory. There's barely enough space for the do not trash international pictogram. Overclocking in the Catalyst control Center wasn't completely on-target and some manual tweak was needed.

Well, it pushed the GPU a little too far and ATITool detected artifacts at these overclocked defaults. We reduced it manually to 700MHz, which is a nice overclock. The memory had a little more headroom than what the utility settled on, and we had no issues with it at 2150MHz, a lesser overclock. We should think that after market cooling will help a lot. If NVIDIA had not emergency price dropped the GeForce 9800 GTX, the Radeon HD 4850 would have completely dominated the market. The $200 is the perfect price for a video card, something that most people can spare when building or upgrading their gaming machines.

Even with the competition, ATI's superior Vista drivers and better overall product makes the GeForce 9800 GTX a lesser buy for the same price. Single slot cooling, a quiet cooling, power efficiency, cinematic video acceleration, and Intel ready CrossFire are all critical wins for this product. And did we mention Linux support? This card includes open source Linux drivers in the box. NVIDIA's been second to ATI on all these fronts, and now that performance is in ATI's favor, and NVIDIA's got nothing left but to cut their prices in the mainstream segment. Which is exactly what they have done to keep up with the competition.

That price drop alone is what makes the GeForce 9800 competitive again. Still, we would go with the Radeon HD 4850. And check it out, we already have a CrossFire happy motherboard. It's not that it's a great buy for the frame rates, it's just a great buy, with no weaknesses to speak of.