Its wide-spread acclaim stems purely from the amount of raw performance it delivers for the price being charged – it’s unprecedented, unadultered price-to-performance delta simply rocks. You may think that sounds awfully fanboyish, however, all one needs to do is read a few articles and reviews on it to see that the results we’ll show in this review add all the evidence we need to be so excited about this GPU.

In addition to its excellent single card performance, the 4850 also eclipses the performance of a single 4870 for around the same price. No matter how you stack it, the 4850 is the card to beat for NVIDIA and is helping AMD/ATI gain some lost foothold in the PC enthusiast sector.

The 4000-series of GPUs from ATI has clearly put NVIDIA on the defensive and that’s evident by its aggressive price slashing and, announcing “new” (spelled hacked-up revisions of current products) video cards. This is a great position for AMD and its add-in board partners to be in – if it can keep this pace up, it’ll enjoy a long time in the world of sublime graphics.

Comparing video cards – at times – is sort of like comparing a Suburban vs. a Yukon – both are based on the exact same platform and are competitively priced. This is the dilemma I recently faced when doing this review of the Palit Radeon 4850 and Gigabyte’s latest offering in the form of its 4850.

---