May 4th, 2008
Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic 512MB Review @ ThinkComputers
The ATI 4000 series video cards have taken the VGA world by storm. The surprising performance of the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, both based on the AMD/ATI R770 GPU, has driven down prices of all other video cards due to the low release prices of both. The HD 4850, at under $200, performs as well as the geForce 9800GTX, which only a few months ago was the most powerful single-GPU card on the market, and sold for over $350. The HD 3870′s performance rivals that of nVidia’s GTX 280, which a few weeks ago cost $150 more than the 3870′s release price of $300.
If you’ve ever noticed, there is a limited number of ATI partners building Radeon video cards. ATI has always allowed a limited number of companies to build ATI-based cards, to keep from flooding the market with a huge number of identical video cards. They also limit the market area that their partners sell in, for example, not all of their partners are allowed to sell in the US market.
