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Power Consumption

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.

VisionTek recommends a 450W or greater PSU for their Radeon HD 4850, and a 450W should be fine -- efficiency has indeed climbed for the 4800 series, and almost doesn't seem possible that this card is capable of a terraFLOP's worth of number crunching at this level of power.

The HD4850 just requires one PCIe power connector to get your game on.
 

Verdict: Good times

Overall, there isn't all that much negative to say about the HD4850 -- the engineers at ATI really crafted a fine piece of work here, and they should be proud of themselves. This product must have succeeded in reaching all of their internal goals -- or possibly well surpassed them.

The VisionTek Radeon HD 4850 is lean, slick, and a stick of dynamite in a knife fight when up against the competition. Delivering a product to the market for $199 that packs this much punch is almost shockingly refreshing. If you read (or write) many hardware reviews, you might get a bit jaded after hearing how every new product comes out is this fast, or that fast, or this much faster than the last fast. But really, for the performance levels put out by this single-slot card, relatively speaking as new generations of video cards go, for $199 the HD4850 just inspires.  

Not that NVIDIA is out of this round, by any long long-stretch however. They cut the costs of the 9800GTX to $199, and will be releasing very shortly a 9800GTX+ die-shrunk model that should compete well against the HD 4850, at around $229. And then you have the GTX 280 -- and what can you say, it's the fastest card on the market. But when you compare the big, power-hungry, much more expensive GTX 260 and GTX 280 cards to this svelte and zippy, $199 HD 4850... well, it just seems like the RV700 is one step ahead of the GT200, from conception, to execution.

With the improvments in AA performance (including the new edge detect filter mode), DirectX10.1, performance-per-Watt, price, HDMI improvements, UVD 2 optimizations, and just plain fantastic framerate-pushing performance, it looks like the HD 4800 series will go down in the great annals of video card releases as one of the most significant and startling products from AMD/ATI in quite some time. The HD4850 significantly changes the NVIDIA/AMD dichotomy, and the biggest benefiarcy of this change is the PC gamer. Bust out the beverages.

With this particular HD4850 from VisionTek, you also get the added benefit of an extended warranty, and a toll free tech support line in case you run into any trouble. If I really had to pick flaws with this card I'd say its just a bit too hot, and consequently, not much of an overclocker; but in the face of all the good things about the VisionTek Radeon HD4850, it easily deserves the highest of accolades.