Introduction, Specifications and Features

No matter what you think of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series of video cards, you'd be crazy not to love what AMD did with the pricing of the first two cards (Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870) from the series. As a result of AMD's aggressive pricing, NVIDIA felt compelled to lower the price of its latest GeForce video cards, the GeForce GTX 260 and the GTX 280. It's not often that ATI can actually make NVIDIA fans smile as big as its own or vice versa. Ultimately, though, you don't have to favor one brand over the other to appreciate the downward pressure that the new Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 put on pricing.

Overall, we've been quite impressed with what we've seen of the HD 4800 Series, especially considering the amount of power the cards offer for the price. In this article, we are going to take a look at a card from one of AMD/ATI's primary board partners, MSI. The card up to bat today is the MSI R4850 512M, which as you can no doubt surmise, is a Radeon HD 4850.

The R4850 512M sports 512MB of DDR3 and reference clock speeds. Although it does not feature a factory overclock, the card does sport a custom cooler that promises to keep the GPU much cooler than ATI's reference cooler. As we told you in our ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series launch article, the HD 4800 Series' RV770 GPU boasts 956 million transistors on a 55nm fabrication process. To see how well the MSI R4850 512M performs, we'll pit it against a Radeon HD 4870, a Radeon HD 3850, a GeForce GTX 260 and a couple GeForce 9800 GTXs.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series Specifications and Features