The current worldwide economic crisis has hit the computer industry especially hard. Companies like Intel, Microsoft and many others have reported lower than expected revenues for the winter quarter that has caused many of the stocks to plummet in recent months. Companies in the US have begun laying off people like there's no tomorrow. There has always been a balance between the best performing video card and the price that one is willing to pay for that video card. Video cards based upon the Radeon HD 4850 video chip have been enormously popular due to its high performance for a reasonable price. Today ASUS released a new version of the Radeon HD 4850 with modified cooling. - Motherboards

ASUS Extreme AH4850 512MB Matrix Version Review

The ASUS Extreme AH4850 Matrix video card is based upon ATI's RV770 chip that was released last year which comes with 800 stream processors and the ability to use GDDR5 memory. The card has a clock speed of 625MHz, which is similar to the reference clock of the Radeon HD 4850. Where the Matrix board really shines though is in its cooling and software. The Radeon HD 4850 has two bridges for CrossFire mode, meaning that the card can be daisy chained with up to three other Radeon HD 4850 boards to improve performance in games and applications that support it, with a custom designed cooling solution.

There are eight memory chips on the board, and each of the chips is a 512-bit chip, bringing a total of 512MB of GDDR3 memory being clocked at 1986MHz by default. ASUS provides everything you need to get started with the new video card except for a top flight game. The graphics card was able to safely overclock to 790/2200MHz, which is just an incredible overclock. The positives of this card include an excellent cooling solution that doesn't quit and keeps the card running cool. Under load temperatures of 44°C maximum at default clock speeds is just amazing. And that alone already is the greatest added value.

The card overclocked successfully to near the maximum allowed by the Overdrive utility or the ASUS iTracker utility. The board is very popular among enthusiasts as it offers high performance at a reasonable price. The only questions we have as to this card is what the next generation from both NVIDIA and ATI will bring later this year as its over six months since the launch of the Radeon HD 4870 cards. Now ATI tends to release new graphics cards every year and the next generation shouldn't be too far away. And ASUS's design works well within the confines the Radeon HD 4850 set.