Installation

As with most videocards, installation was a snap. Press the card in, and screw in the PCI bracket to secure. Don't forget the 6-pin PCI-Express power connection.

Unlike the Palit GeForce 9600 GSO, the Radeon HD4850 doesn't block my SATA ports.

With the physical installation complete, all that was left to do was install the latest Catalyst 8.6 driver in both Linux and Windows. Both versions of the drive can be found on AMD's website.

Benchmark Setup

I'll be using the same system I've used in previous videocard reviews, and the system will be running both Windows Vista Business 64-bit with Service Pack 1 and Gentoo Linux 2008.0 64-bit. I'll look at some of the latest games in Windows, and look at a few similar benchmarks in Linux including results from the Phoronix Test Suite.

That said, I'll be able to compare the Radeon HD4850 directly against videocards I've reviewed previously. Let's get started with the Windows benchmarks. I'll be looking at performance in 3dMark06 and Vantage, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, Quake 4, and Half-Life 2.