Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Honestly, the Radeon HD4850 has blown me away over the last week or so. While this card is not even the flagship of the HD 4800 series, the performance offerings are enough to attract me. Through our series of benchmarks, I saw the Radeon HD4850 beat the competition in Windows, and not fall far from the top score in Linux.

I would have liked to have seen some improved performance in Linux, but our friends at AMD have assured us that the issue is merely that the drivers haven't yet been optimized for the new family of cards. Hopefully the next release will bring better performance, and the ability to distinguish the HD4850's performance fromt he HD3870's performance in Linux.

I would say that the Radeon HD4850 could give nVidia a run for their money, but recent events have already proven that it has. Since BIOSLEVEL.com is a little behind on publishing this review, we've already seen nVidia lower prices on several of their performance cards to stay competitive with AMD. The next few months should prove to be interesting as manufacturers add their own special touches and factory overclocking to this family of cards.

All in all, I have absolutely no complaints about the Sapphire Radeon HD4850. When paired with a Phenom quad-core CPU and 500W power supply, I've found no system instabilities, and the gaming performance is definitely there. I was a little afraid when I first tested the card and saw the high temperatures, but the update firmware corrected that issue. Once AMD optimizes the Catalyst Linux driver, I have no doubt this card may be able to give nVidia yet another run for their money, and this time in Linux... something that has never happened before.

Pros

• PCI-Express 2.0 Support
• 512MB GDDR3
• CrossFireX Supports up to four GPUs
• Runs relatively cool
• HDCP / HDMI compliant for watching HD movies on HD displays
• Free games and USB drive included
• Only takes up one slot

Cons

• ATI Linux driver still needs work

Rating

10/10