Pricing

To have a better view on the pricing ratings, we gathered data from Geizhals.eu (Europe) and Froogle.com (USA) and averaged out the prices.



The HD 4850 is a lot less costly than the 9800GTX, which makes it very good price/performance-wise.

Evaluation

When I read the first reviews of the HD4850, I instantly noticed how almost every media claimed that this is thé best card in the price/performance ratio class. It's quite obvious actually, because the card performs almost on par with the 9800GTX, in some tests even better, and it's very well priced. This kind of shows which direction AMD has chosen to follow, the direction that made the company as what it is today: not the absolute top product, but nearly unbeatable in the price/performance ratios. AMD already cut prices in the CPU segment, making it possible to buy quad cores at less than €100. To be honest, if you want a good gaming setup, you could consider the Spider platform: a Phenom processor and multiple HD 4000 series cards in Crossfire-X. You'd be amazed about the performance you get.

ATI HD 4850

+ Price
+ Performance
+ Single slot cooling solution
- Temperature
- Noise when fan at full speed

Ati HD4850 recommended for


Conclusive thoughts

Yes, the HD4850 is a price/performance hit. AMD did their best and improved the previous generation cards to make a very low-cost middle-end video card. Madshrimps will be conducting further tests with the HD 4850 and will compare it against the newer GTX 260 to see if the card is able to keep up. Furthermore, we will be spending time on overclocking the HD 4850 to the extreme.

To finish, I would like to thank Steeve from AMD and Barbara from Gainward for allowing us to re-use their 9800 GTX, MSI for the P45 Platinum and Tones.be, Belgium’s Biggest Hardware Shop for providing the Intel E8500 CPU.

'Till the next time, stay tuned!