It are the users who requested it, so XFX quenched their thirst by embarking on their ATI journey say the sources from within the company. Talking to the company’s representatives, we all heard words like all of us at XFX are excited for recent developments but the most important thing is that we want to provide our users with the right choice, whether it's NVIDIA or ATI, we simply want to give them the best graphics card for the money they're willing to invest in. Today, we bring you the Radeon HD 4850 512MB with the triple X approach. Although a bit on the long side, the name gives off the XFX manufacturers on two places, with the special overclocking being the main point to focus on. - FudZilla

XFX Radeon HD 4850 XXX Edition Video Style Review

We won't be commenting on looks too much, as we really like it, but we will supply you all the info about how this card runs with the provided cooling. It's clear from the picture that this is a dual slot card, whose cooling covers the entire face of the card. As you may remember, after NVIDIA showed its high-end oriented products, the GeForce GTX 200 series, ATI played its cards on the mainstream level and brought us the Radeon HD 4800 series. Both ATI's cards use the same RV770 graphics processor, that packs almost a billion transistors, but note that they're running at different speeds and use different memory.

The RV770 GPU is built in 55nm technology and has 800 stream processors, which is a significant improvement over the previous Radeon HD 3800 generation. The Radeon HD 4800 series brought about numerous improvements, so many partners, which were previously loyal to NVIDIA, started including ATI's cards in their offers. XFX did it only recently and, as far as we recall, was one of the last who pounced on the chance to capitalize on ATI's success. We all know XFX, a company whose name has a nice ring and even nicer reputation, and we hope that they'll keep their reputation of one of the most favorite brands around.

While their faster Radeon HD 4870 runs at 750MHz, the Radeon HD 4850 has a noticeably slower clocks, 625MHz though XFX went a bit further and overclocked it 650MHz. As far as memory goes, both cards feature 256-bit memory interface, but on their Radeon HD 4870 they opted for GDDR5 memory in order to stay competitive versus NVIDIA. That is how ATI managed to increase the bandwidth without expanding the memory interface, and stand up to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 card. Our XFX Radeon HD 4850 XXX edition card features 512MB of GDDR3 memory with the Samsung branding and clocked at 2100MHz effectively.

Now for the first time, we have tested an XFX card not coming from NVIDIA. The Radeon HD 4850 XXX edition with its long name is actually the famous Radeon HD 4850 but with that special XFX flavor. The XFX guys used their own cooler, ended up using different PCB painted black, overclocked the card and sell it at about $165. This board is the GeForce 9800 GTX+'s direct competitor, and the XFX Radeon HD 4850 XXX version is a capable card that beats it in quite a couple of tests. And by all means that would mean beating their very own GeForce 9800 GTX+ as well but at least they offer the choice to their buyers.

You can find these reference Radeon HD 4850's at about $135, but XFX's card comes with an overclocked core, dual slot cooling that will add to the card's overclocking potential and a name that says you didn't make a mistake in buying this card, as XFX once again proves it's a force to be reckoned with. On that note, we sincerely recommend the Radeon HD 4850 XXX edition, as the Radeon HD 4850 still has one of the best price to performance ratios out there.