Home > Consumer Reviews > Sapphire HD4850 Pcie 512MB DDR3 2PORT Dvi-i/tv Out 256BIT

I just upgraded to this 4850 from a 7600GT, so the difference was enormous for me.
So far, I'm extremely pleased, and very impressed, with this card. It's less than $200, and it has power to handle everything you throw at it to date (within reason). It needs only 1 6-pin PCIe connector as well, instead of 2 like it's competition, the GTX260.
The GTX260 is a tad faster, it's true, but it's around 10-20% faster for an increase of around 80% in price (at time of writing this). That's enough for me to decide on this little powerhouse.
So you get an idea of what it does: so far, I can play Crysis at High with CCC mod at 1280x1024 butter smooth (not a single frame drop... can probably go higher), CoD4 at max on everything at this rez, and it's 3DMark06 score (sorry, no Vista for Vantage) is 11,900ish.
People are talking about how hot this card runs, and that is true. Out of the box, it comes with a stock fan speed of around 20-30%, which makes the card sit at 70-80ºC on idle. It still loads at around 85ºC though. With the easy fan fix mentioned by the previous reviewer, and setting the fan speed to barely 45%, mine went all the way down to 53ºC at idle. Same load temperature of course.

This is the card to get right now.

great card for this price. quite hot, (70 deg.idle) but after fan rotation fixing (45%, no noise) temp. become 50 idle & 70 load

stable OC 690/1050 MHz (original - 625/993)

P.S. download newer drivers and RivaTuner

Just upgraded my computer to play Warhammer Online. Previously had a GeForce 7800 that I paid $450 for. Anyhow, I was extremely excited about this card's price and benchmarks, so I finally bought it. It was a tough choice between Sapphire and Powercooler, but Sapphire seemed to have more enthusiasts swearing on their quality and performance.

First impression was that the card was very well manufactured. The heat-sink covers most of the card in a curved fashion; I'm guessing it's for the air to travel over more surface area. It's almost 1/3 the thickness and weight of my brother's GeForce 8800gt. It is a tad long though, which brings me to gripe about the power connector being on the end (I have a mid-atx case, so I had to move a hard drive to be able to connect the power cable).

The reviews about it running hot are absolutely true. When I first ran temperatures, the card registered 81 C, which was way too hot for my liking. Being a tinker that I am, I came across a fan fix after googling "ati radeon 4850 fan speed". There is an abundance of sites that give you step-by-step instructions. Very helpful. My card now idles at 49-50 C (heavy load 64 C) with the fan running at 45%, very cool.

I now play Warhammer Online at 1920 x 1200 in max detail (at factory defaults). Spectacular performance without drops in frame rate, highly recommended.

- AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+, Gigabyte GA-MA-78GM-S2H, G.SKILL 2 x 1GB DDR2 1066Mhz, Sapphire Radeon 4850

Es la mejor tarjeta en el rango de 200us$. Excelente. El unico detalle que que su fan viene de fabrica al 30%. Pero eso de arregla con el fanfix creando perfiles en el catalyst. Su rendimiento de primera clase. I love it.- :)