SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Video 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: I have been watching the 8800GT/GTS's drop in prices the past month and was waiting for a good promotion / game bundle to come along before I bought one. I am so glad I waited for this one. I upgraded from a x1950XT and scored 50% higher in the basic 3DMark2006 (5538 -> 8277). With the rebate and promotional code this card is the same price as the x1950XT that I bought a year ago so I was definitely convinced that this card was a great buy. The research that I did shows this card outperforms the 9800GTX and is on par with the 9800GTX+ but at a cheaper price so I would say get this over the 9800GTX's unless they come down in price and you are a big nVidia fan (you have to love competition). I finished Crysis several months ago but I am playing it again to check out the Very High quality settings. I am very impressed with how it handles Crysis since I am running at a higher resolution and higher quality than what I did with my old card. I'm even getting higher framerates

Cons: Typically I don't like to see a video card go above 75°C and this card idles close to that and goes above 85°C when under load.

Overall Review: Although the card gets hot it seems that is how video card manufacturers are stating to make cards. As of yet there are no third party utilities out there to adjust the fan speed for this card (ASUS includes one with their card) I found a trick you can do with Catalyst Control Center. You have to enable overdrive, create a profile, and then manually modify and XML file (Google "HD 4870 Fan-Control, Easy Workaround"). Also many people have complained about noise and my power supply fans are louder even after increasing my fan speed. With my x1950XT I used Riva Tuner to crank up the fan to keep the temps under 75°C and it was much louder. My old card also had more of a wine and the 4850 has more of a woosh when it gets closer to full speed. I much prefer the woosh. My next upgrade will be a CPU. I currently have a C2D 4300 @ 1.8 GHz and would like to get a Quad Core. My CPU is most likely starving this card and I could see a significant improvement in benchmarks with a better C

Pros: With my old Nvidia 8600GTS I scored 6,389 in 3dmark6, with the 4850 I now score 12,217! This is the best graphics card in terms of price/performance. The fan is pretty quiet, and it comes with a case sticker :).

Cons: ATITool and Riva Tuner will not work with this graphics card(yet). Gets hot. I have really good cooling and still reached 86c in Fur Benchmark. I guess it can handle high temps though....

Overall Review: Buy this graphics card! And an aftermarket cooler to go with it! ;p

Pros: Runs Source Games, FSX, and Crysis at max or near max settings. ATI CCC as good as ever.

Cons: Sapphire rebate unnecessarily complex. Runs hot, will start looking at aftermarket cooling for better OC and this will push my case purchase up as my case is about 8 years old and I could use one with better thermals when I go CrossFireX.

Overall Review: Went on the Nvidia bandwagon when they were beating ATI in 3D graphics. Paid the price in TV/HDTV out capabilities. Glad to see ATI on top in 3D and configuration options especially for TV/HDTV out.

Pros: The performance is simply amazing, it ran Stalker at full speed (60fps) at full resolution (1440x900).

Cons: Out of the box, the fan speed is set to around 22%. This is stupid! There is no software solution to this. What you have to do (which no other reviewer bothered to explain) is, in the CCC, Click Profile->profile manager, create a new one with "All CCC settings", save, apply and close. Then windows search for the name of your profile, open with notepad, and chance "FanSpeedAlgorithm" value="Automatic" to "Manual" and the speed to whatever percent you want! However, note that above 40% the fan begins to make noise.

Overall Review: With this easy fix, you will be running 45-50 degrees C non-gaming rather than 75-80!

Pros: Fast, get 100-200 fps in half-life on max settings/resolution. Allows you to play in 4:3 aspect ratio with black bars on the side if you don't like widescreen. Heat issues can easily be fixed using the catalyst drivers profile.

Cons: My box didnt come with a manual... Don't use the card's default fan speed settings and make a profile. 7% speed... ouch.

Overall Review: This thing does not run hot as other people say it does. The heat issues come from ati's fan controller that slows down the fan when you are not playing a game. And even when you're playing a game, it does not run the fan at high speeds. The fan is not even audible for the most part. To fix the heat you just have to create a catalyst profile which sets the fan speed to 50-60% at all times. At 50% fan speed you can barely hear it and the card is running 38 degrees cooler, at least for me. 80C->42C.

Pros: This card is awesome, plays all of my games 1680x1050 with max AA, highest resolution (I have to tweak some settings in games to get a higher FPS than average ,but in the end everything looks outstanding).

Cons: This card gets hot! Drivers are faulty for XP professional x64 OS, might have been me though I was updating drivers for like 4 different new items on my PC att...

Overall Review: My case has decent air flow and idle temps around 45-50C. Around full load temps skip around 55-70C from what Ive seen, maybe gets hotter but nothing really noticable. Go ATi!! Go Newegg!!

Pros: This card is a standard ATI design nothing special added from the manufacturer. That said … ATI did a fantastic job with this card and its implementation. Definitely worth the money. Basically redefined the $200 and under market as soon as it was released.

Cons: The rebate for this thing is just plain silly, you have to go to a web site, register (giving your personal info to a wealth of unwanted emailers and junk mail sending people I would assume), enter some promo code from the rebate form, get an activation code, place the activation and promo code with the newegg.com name on the back of the envelope, and then do all the other “normal” stuff like fill out the downloaded form , get your invoice , and attach your upc code from the box. Basicly its like the company really really wants to make people just toss up their hands in frustration or miss a step so they can disqualify your rebate request easily. They mention repeatedly that they will disqualify your request if you do any of a dozen things wrong. The web site you have to go to talks about how they want to be “fair” to the companies and the end users. Their commitment is clearly to making sure they keep as much money for everyone but the consumer so make sure you read the instructions a

Overall Review: They should stop with this rebate junk and just make them instant or lower the price permanently; consumers don’t like being asked to do paperwork after they lay down their hard earned cash.