Pricing:

CDW now has the Radeon HD 4870 here for $349.99. Newegg is selling the 4850 for $199.99.   As more etailers get on the band wagon we fully expect pricing to drop particularly with Nvidia announcing the GeForce 9800GTX+.

Conclusion:

While we haven't had a long time to look at ATI's new Radeon HD 4850 series of cards what we have looked at in gaming performance is nothing short of amazing for a $200 card and from a company treading water only a year ago. ATI is resurgent and the 4850 is just the what the company needed and AMD especially. AMD's CPU division could use some of the ability to compete that ATI has shown lately badly but for now ATI is the shining star from AMD with excellent integrated graphics and chipsets and now easily the best performance on the market from a single slot card. Nothing really comes too close and it is good to see competition heating up again from Nvidia and ATI that was dormant for too long. Now the question is does Nvidia have something up their sleeve soon, were they hiding something in that 18 month wait for a follow up to the GeForce 8800 GTX more than the very expensive GTX 280? We shall see but for now the Radeon 4850 does a good job of emulating a GeForce 9800 GTX at an amazing price and we can't wait to see what the 4870 is able to offer up. Congrats to ATI, now we just wish we had more time for a review in the future :).

Score: 99%