Home > Consumer Reviews > Diamond 4850 PCIE 512MB GDDR3 Video Card

I bought it after reading several reviews online, and I wanted to use an ATI card for a change. It seemed to me that nVidia cards were somewhat overpriced. The 4850 card was generating so much fuss, that it couldn't be so bad a card.
Boy am I glad I bought it. This card smokes. I have it hooked to 2 lcd monitors, and it doesn't even hiccup with several OpenGL programs open at once. I'm not too much into gaming, and use XP64bit, Vista gives me the shivers, too much bad press on the OpenGL side.
Unless you REALLY need the features of the Quadro or FireGL (or FirePro) cards, this card is more than suitable for CAD-related work. And some apps like Lightwave don't benefit from the high-end features on those much-more-expensive cards.
This is supposed to be a gaming card. But it handles 3d apps (Lightwave, Silo, Shade, 3d-coat, Poser, etc) marvelously.
I don't give it 5 stars only because the included heat dissipation solution could be improved a bit. By default, the fan is reliant on the GPU load, not on the temperature, so it can be quite hot in idle mode (80° celsius). The card is supposed to be able to take it, but still...
The latest ati tray tools let you control the fan speed by temperature, but still, it should be automatic. So if you buy the card, don't forget to download them, and enable the fan thingy.

I took a 8 year hiatus from ATI video cards and switched over to Nvidia. Back then ATI drivers were notorious for being buggy, late arriving, and having issues with a few select games. I see some things haven't changes dispite the fact that AMD has purchased ATI. In this particular case it's not the driver itself this time but rather the ATI CATALYST CONTROL CENTER software that controls the display features. It suddenly displays an error message upon Windows start-up and will not load. I did NOTHING to cause this to start happening. I did a Google search and discovered all kinds of well documented cases of the same problems. In addition, when you try to uninstall the Catalyst software, it still leaves items in your hard drive's "programs" folder and in the context menu. BACK TO NVIDIA I GO!

This is my first experience buying an accesory for my pc and so far I can say this has been a really great experience, fast service, secure, low cost, awesome card. Too bad I haven't had the time to tried it at its full capacity but is working great so far, I really do feel like this is at least 5 times better than my original card but I still need to do a lot more testing to be completely satisfied.

I purchased this card after lots of years as a nVidia fanboi. I wanted this card to play Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. I wanted this card to drive a Dell 30" at 2560 x 1600.

I replaced my nVidia card, after installing Catalyst 8.7 and everything worked fine.

I was impressed with the ease of use to get it to work, truly plug and play.

I have recommended this card to numerous friends and only one has gone back to the overpriced nVidia solutions.

ATI had finally managed to get competitive again on price/performance and drivers. A lot of sites will claim this chipset is the best deal under 200 dollars, and I agree. It is very fast, very stable, and makes for a good single card solution for gamers who want high grade graphics on a sensible budget.