To make the comparison between Sapphire HD 4850 and the other video cards we included in this review easier, we compiled the table below comparing the main specs from these cards. If you want to compare the specs of Radeon HD 4850 to any other video card not included on the table below, just take a look on our nVidia Chips Comparison Table and on our AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table.

GPU	Core Clock	Shader Clock	Processors	Memory Clock	Memory Interface	Memory Transfer Rate	Memory	Price
GeForce GTX 280	602 MHz	1,296 MHz	240	1,107 MHz	512-bit	141.7 GB/s	1 GB GDDR3	USD 620 - 660
GeForce 9800 GX2	600 MHz	1,500 MHz	128	1,000 MHz	256-bit	64 GB/s	1 GB GDDR3	USD 420 - 550
GeForce 9800 GTX	675 MHz	1,688 MHz	128	1,100 MHz	256-bit	70.4 GB/s	512 MB GDDR3	USD 200 - 300
Rsdeon HD 4850	625 MHz	625 MHz	800	993 MHz	256-bit	63.5 GB/s	512 MB GDDR3	USD 195
Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2	857 MHz	857 MHz	320	927 MHz	256-bit	59.33 GB/s	1 GB GDDR3	–
Radeon HD 3870	776 MHz	776 MHz	320	1,125 MHz	256-bit	72 GB/s	512 MB GDDR4	USD 135 - 240

As you can see the main difference between the new Radeon HD 4850 and its competitors is the amazing number of processing units, 800 against 128 on GeForce 9800 GTX, for example.

In order to compete with Radeon HD 4850, nVidia reduced the maximum suggested price (MRSP) of GeForce 9800 GTX to USD 199, so Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX are, today, on the same price range. At least officially – think about it, if you are a reseller and has your stock loaded with USD 300 video cards, would you lower them to USD 200 just because nVidia told you so? One week ago GeForce 9800 GTX was quoted between USD 270 and USD 355. nVidia has also launched a “new” high-end video card, GeForce 9800 GTX+, which is basically an overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX. Click here to read the full story.

Some important observations regarding this table:

• All nVidia chips are DirectX 10 (Shader 4.0), while all AMD/ATI chips are DirectX 10.1 (Shader 4.1).
• The memory clocks listed are the real memory clock. Memory clocks are often advertised as double the figures presented, numbers known as “DDR clock”.
• GeForce 9800 GX2 and Radeon HD 3870 X2 have two GPU’s. The numbers on the table represent only one of the chips.
• All video cards included on our review were running at the chip manufacturer default clock configuration (i.e. no overclocking), except Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2. The official core clock for Radeon HD 3870 X2 is 825 MHz, while the official memory clock is 900 MHz. So this card was a little bit overclocked. We couldn’t reduce these clocks to their reference values and since we hadn’t any other Radeon HD 3870 X2 available we included this video card anyway.
• Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.
• We couldn’t find Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2 for sale. This model will be more expensive than cards from other vendors based on the same GPU because it features water cooling. Just for you to have an idea, prices on the regular Radeon 3870 X2 are quoted between USD 300 and USD 380.

Before going to our tests let’s recap the main features from Sapphire HD 4850.