The folks at Sapphire were recently kind enough to send us an overclocked sample of one of these mid-range cards, the Radeon HD4650. Sapphire's overclocked Radeon HD4650 features 512MB of GDDR3, 320 Stream processors, and a 700MHz memory clock. BIOSLEVEL.com will look at how this card fairs against its older brothers, as well as nVidia's mainstream offerings from the 9x00 family of GeForce cards.

With the Radeon HD4800-series videocards only having been released a few short months ago, Sapphire has already released a factory-overclocked version of the HD4850. Under Sapphire's Toxic branding, the new card promises better performance with cooler temperatures with a quieter Zalman cooling solution.

Palit recently sent their new Radeon HD4850 videocard our way, and while it lacks some of the improvements I saw in the GeForce 9600 GSO Sonic, I'll look at a newer firmware version than the Sapphire Radeon HD4850 BIOSLEVEL.com previously looked at.

Sapphire supplied us with one of their initial Radeon HD4850 videocards, which features 512MB of GDDR3 memory, CrossFireX support, and is probably one of the fastest cards we've looked at yet. The Sapphire Radeon HD4850 promises cutting-edge performance, but incredible multimedia processing capabilities as well.

Palit recently sent us the GeForce 9600GSO Sonic, which is an enhanced GeForce 9600GSO. Palit has added its own cooler, as well as factory overclocked the unit, and improved upon the power phases. The 9600 GSO is nVidia's latest foray in the mid-level 9000 series of GeForce cards, and is also the cheapest for a performance card. Despite the price point, the 9600 GSO should be a fair competitor to both the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD3650.