If the GeForce 8800 GT was the gaming board made for the PC gaming masses everyman in 2007, well in 2008 it would be the Radeon HD 4850. The Radeon HD 4850 was the flagship initial release of the Radeon HD 4800 series, marking the a new resurgence of AMD in the discrete graphics card market. And it was the Radeon HD 4870 that wowed gamers by being able to keep up with the much more expensive GeForce GTX 280, and blew away even many more gamers with its impressive anti-aliasing ability. Though released at virtually the same time, the Radeon HD 4870's little brother was the product that offered some great high-end performance at a price point that was affordable by most. - NeoSeeker

MSI Radeon HD 4850 HDMI Ready Video Card Review

Though featuring no overclock, the MSI Radeon HD 4850 board features a well designed double slot cooling. The original reference Radeon HD 4850's board design were great video cards, but if they had one major flaw, it was that they run quite hot. Not hot enough to cause a premature death of the GPU chip, but hot enough that you couldn't touch the cooler without having some aloe vera burn-balm within hand's reach. Featured on many other current MSI cards, including their Radeon HD 4830 and GeForce 9800 GT models, their contemporary MSI cooler is an effective design with excellent cooling features.

Four copper heatpipes span across the bottom of the card, reaching into a deck of horizontally aligned aluminum heat fins. The fins are cooled by a large fan positioned above the GPU, that is capable of achieving some high speeds. The heat fins are also encased in a plastic cover that helps push the air into all the right places. The bracket of the Radeon HD 4850 is artistically engraved with the letters MSI, a nice touch that no other brand does. The Radeon HD 4850 also features CrossFireX support, allowing it to be linked to up to three other boards, with of course a CrossFireX compatible motherboard to get it working.

The front of their Radeon HD 4850's box features some sort of orc performance artist whose eye happen to be on fire. Also is a very lopsided live update online sticker. All in all, it is a good bundle. The only thing that seems like it might be missing is a CrossFire bridge, as the Radeon HD 4850 makes a good candidate for some multi-GPU action. Manually setting the fan to 100%, we pushed this card to see what it could do. After many cruelling loops of Far Cry 2, we found that 650/2176MHz was as far we could get with out hurting the card's stability. This isn't that bad of an overclock, but we were hoping for a little bit more.

When the first Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards arrived on the scene, we were boggled by the performance they offered. And now about four months later, the brightness of the Radeon HD 4850 star has sort of dimmed, by a small but perceptible amount. All Radeon HD 4850's offer very good bang for the buck still, but they no longer dominate all other cards selling in their price bracket of around $200. Also NVIDIA has very aggressively cut prices on their products, and most notably the GeForce 9800 GTX, and the slightly faster GTX+ version both offer seriously competitive challenges for the Radeon HD 4850 cards to face in battle.

And from ATI's own line-up, the Radeon HD 4830 also offer good value for the money. With that being said, how about this particular Radeon HD 4850? Overall this Radeon HD 4850 offers a good package. The cooler is well designed, and is fairly quiet. The bundle is complete but something feels like it could be missing from the Radeon HD 4850. Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is that with this cooler, the MSI Radeon HD 4850 just seems to be begging for an overclock. Well MSI is no stranger to overclocking, but unfortunately any overclocking this particular model will see will be at the hands of the users, and not by MSI itself.

So, if you are not going to be overclocking this video card yourself, it is a bit of tougher sell over MSI's own standard Radeon HD 4850 reference design, which sells for about $30 less. There is nothing at all that really disappoints with this Radeon HD 4850 card. But with the incredible wealth of options available today, ranging from $150 to $200, MSI's Radeon HD 4850 version does well but doesn't particularly stick out.