Despite all the rumours swirling around, it was still quite a surprise (albeit a very pleasant one) to see XFX, previously an NVIDIA GPU stalwart, signing up to produce ATI-branded graphics boards as well. We're now starting to see the fruits of this deal, as today we take a look at our first AMD-based part from XFX, in the form of the Radeon HD 4850 XXX. It's factory clocked and features a custom cooling solution, but is that enough to let it stand out from the crowd?

While XFX have always tended to stick with a given board's reference solution when it comes to launching new NVIDIA-based parts, in the case of the Radeon HD 4850 XXX they've decided to replace the cooling solution as well as upping both core and memory clock speeds. While this board's RV770 GPU gets a modest 25MHz increase, finding itself clocked at 650MHz, the memory used on this XXX Edition part is clocked at 1050MHz, giving the 512MB of GDDR3 on-board a more significant 57MHz boost.

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