Radeon HD 4850 Review Roundup - Gigabyte, HIS, Sapphire

“The Sapphire HD 4850 Dual Slot Fansink is a another great card from Sapphire. The performance to dollar ratio is almost unbeatable. Right now these are going for as little as $159.99. For the price you pay you get awesome performance. It is almost like the 8800 GT of its time.

This card also comes with DX10.1. This is a feature that Nvidia currently doesn't support. It can lead to much higher frame rates in games with AA inabled, and it is really a revolutionary technology. Hopefully, more games will take advantage of it in the near future.

The cooling on the card is also a very nice feature. It allows the card to run much cooler than any stock air cooled single slot solution. Its load and idle temperatures are simply amazing. The lower temps help a lot in overclocking, which I am sure many of us will want to do right when we get it in the computer.”

“The Gigabyte GV-R485MC-1GH with it's fanless "Multi-Core" cooling technology is ideal for any gamer and HTPC enthusiast who cherish silence. The "Multi-Core" cooling technology really lowers the GPU temperatures by as much as 15-20 degrees Celsius over a standard stock cooler. The overall performance is on par with other Radeon HD 4850s, so it's all good here ... but for the hardcore enthusiasts, you might want to look elsewhere.”

“In direct comparisons with its main competition, the Radeon HD 4850 finds itself in a nice spot currently - right near the top of the charts overall, and one of the elite cards in the sub-$200 price range. That said, both of the cards featured in this article come pre-overclocked which only helps their performance even more. The 10 MHz advantage in the HIS card's GPU speed and the 50 MHz advantage in memory speed on the Sapphire card, pretty much canceled out any advantages one card may have had over the other, and we found that the HIS and Sapphire cards ended up in a virtual tie throughout our benchmark testing.”