ASUS EAH4850 512MB

[Rob Williams]

Proper competition from AMD in the mid-range scheme of things might have taken a while to happen, but it does happen with the HD 4000 series. We are taking a look at the smaller of the two new models, which offers exceptional performance for the price of $200.

You can read the full article here and discuss it here!

Blah!! Too many videocards these days. Every week a new model is released. And the drivers from last years cards are not perfected. And the performance is irrelevant, you see, next year's integrated graphics chipsets from the likes of intel will outperform these behemoths, and sip power to the tune of 15 watts as a bonus!

I feel sorry for you early adopters blowing a ton'o money on all these things.. sheesh!

With all these variants and model numbers and clock speeds and memory sizes out there how is one supposed to know what to buy? A lot of folks I know just up-and-up and go with integrated graphics or get the cheapest that works. Ati and nvidia are just hurting themselve with such intense granularity!! And they do it because they try to build the fastest chip, when it fails full-spec testing they then offer it in a lesser card with less memory, or shaders or clock speed, or even less addressing bits! blah blah blecchh!! yadda yadda.. Industry been doing that for years!

One more thing, can you guys benchmark the boards with something other than a heavy emphasis on fps style games? Something like flight simulator for a change.. Now that would be interesting!

[Kougar]

Intel's integrated GPUs can't even win against NVIDIA's or AMD's... I'd seriously wonder if they can even beat S3's IGP Chrome yet. G31/G33/G35/G45 are just a joke and with the possible exception of Chrome, don't beat squat.

Asus cards come with fan utility software that easily fixes the heat problem on the 4850. They set the fan speed around 30% so i bumped mine up to around 50% and the temps dropped way down. Only down side of course is the noise but my PC has 4 fans already so the difference is minimal. With the heat problem fixed overclocking is not a big issue but i have not tried it yet. I have purchased NVIDIA cards since my Radeon 9800xt died on me 4 years ago but this card was the best option. I was going to get a new 9800GTX+ or a GTX 260 but they cost more,use more power, and are just too large for a smaller case. These cards are around $190 now before rebate so If you have a small PC case,450w to 500w power supply,and have less than $200 to spend than this is the best option atm.