SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card 100242L

Pros: Excellent Price/Performance ratio. ATI really came back with this card and is giving Nvidia a run for the money. This card can play almost any game on the market at 60+ FPS with all graphical effects at max, or near max settings at high resolutions. I run games like GRID, R6V2, Mass Effect, UT3 @ 1680x1050 (22" LCD) with everything turned up and they are silky smooth (vsync on). 512MB is an added plus and 800 stream processors literally kills any future competition for a very long time until the Green Team surpasses 1,000.

Cons: Stock card runs hot. One solution is to apply the "Profile "Hack" via Catalyst Control Center and increase fan speed to 35-45%. (Google it). Fan is not even audible at this level, but will decrease heat by 10, 15 degrees. Another minor con is the card is so new there aren't even official drivers released yet (Catalyst 8.7 will have HD 4800 series support). For this, use the Beta 8.7s. SKIP the 8.7 Hotfix posted on the ATI/AMD site. These drivers degrade performance on all multimedia apps like games and HD content viewing.

Overall Review: I upgraded from an Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro 256MB card. The difference is staggering. The 1950 Pro was a good card in its time, but the HD 4800 series is serious horsepower for high-end gamers and HD Content lovers. The HD 4870 has 512MB of DDR5 and faster clock speeds, but you still can't beat the price/performance ratio the HD 4850 offers gamers who want high-performance, but at mid-level prices.

Pros: 256 bit interface and plays all games at high or highest settings. Installed with ccc 8.7 easy enough.

Cons: After CCC 8.7 i havent been able to get CCC 8.8 thru 8.10 to install. Have done 9 full reformatts and installs of windows and still wont install. Sapphire said 1 card was bad that was why then they said they thought my motherboard bios needed updated. I have updated the bios to the newest aviable and still i get bsod on ccc 8.10 and on 8.8 and 8.9 visya disables my vga drivers as incompatiale with vista. Games crash on 8.7 after 30 minutes to an hour.

Overall Review: Will have to call newegg and RMA both cards thank heaven i didnt get rebate or i would be dealing with sapphire itself. This way i know that newegg will take care of it in a timely manner and wont give me the headaches id probably get from sapphire.