ATI has a winner of a card on its hands with the HD 4850. Based on the same RV770 architecture as the HD 4870, this one makes do with GDDR3 RAM, and has the same 800 SPs, albeit at lower clock speeds. These are 55nm cards, so ATI decided to go with a single slot cooler. Big mistake! The HD 4850 generates a lot of heat, and we've seen core temperatures ride up to 90 degrees on load, with our air conditioning switched on. It seems there is a driver bug where the fan will not run at more than 30 per cent of its maximum speed, and this causes the card to heat up. There is a driver hack which solves this, but we're not impressed. A graphics card is supposed to be a complete solution, and as with any finished product, you go to market with such glitches ironed out, or address the issues later in drivers. Keeping silent doesn't solve the issue, and refusing to acknowledge it is downright dumb. Just how many users will be geeky enough to install a patch for rectifying this issue is left to be seen. We feel ATI is being extremely lazy here.

Features
Two of the HD 4850s we received used a reference ATI cooler. The Palit HD 4850 had a custom cooler, consisting of an attractive heats ink with a large fan plonked in the middle. This card ran at least 18 degrees cooler throughout the testing, which proves how much additional cooling is needed for this card. Please note that designing inadequate or flawed cooling solutions isn't just an ATI issue, their green counterparts are guilty of the same too. The ASUS EAH 4850 TOP was overclocked to 675 MHz, while Palit and GeCube chose to run their cards at the default recommended clock, i.e. 645 MHz. Bear in mind that the Palit card should have a good overclock potential because of the custom cooler. None ofthese cards came bundled with any games sad. All came with DVI to HDMI adapters an HTPCs builders dream come true if only they didn't get so hot ...

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Performance
The overclock from ASUS allows its card to sail ahead of the other HD 4850s although the margin is only wide under S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and 3D Mark Vantage; mind you, Crysis does give an extra couple of fps at maximum settings. Even Company Of Heroes benefits from the higher clock speeds by a decent amount. We were interested to see how these cards performed in comparison to their HD4870 siblings, but with a core speed advantage of more than 125 MHz, and ultra speedy GDDR5, the HD4850 cannot match up to its costlier sibling. When it comes to pricing, ASUS charges a lot for five per ent more performance its card is a whopping 30 per cent costlier than the Palit HD4850 at Rs 14,400. At Rs 9,950, the Palit is the cheapest HD4850 card available.