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Final thoughts and rating

XFX's Radeon HD 4850 XXX 512MB graphics card builds on the solid foundations of the reference design, but improves upon it with a better-performing cooler and a slight boost to each of the three core frequencies - core, shader, and memory.

The result is that performance is between three and five per cent higher than a vanilla card, evaluated at the 1,920x1,200 resolution, and the card can play most games with relative ease. Price, too, is attractive, coming in at around £10 more than ye olde reference.

Competition from the green team is fierce, with the XFX card duking it out against a GeForce 9800 GTX+ and GeForce GTS 250 - and it's now difficult to buy a stinker of a GPU between £100-£150.

Bringing price into the equation and you could argue that it's well worth spending the extra £20 for a Radeon HD 4870 512MB card or £40 for a reduced-priced GeForce GTX 260, but we feel that XFX has enough going for the XXX Edition to warrant consideration no matter how strong the competition.

Better-than-reference cooling and factory-based overclocking are worth the £10 outlay over a basic card, and that's why we're inclined to recommend the XFX's Radeon HD 4850 XXX 512MB for gamers whose budget doesn't extend far north of £100.

Pros

Much better cooling than on the reference card
Attractive etail price of £125
Pre-overclocked out of the box
Should provide excellent gaming with 1,680x1,050 TFT panels
Great overclocking headroom on sample card

Cons

Double-height cooler may cause some issues if folks want to position it in a SFF box
GeForce 9800 GTX+ (GTS 250) may be an older architecture but still provides serious competition, especially with recent price cuts

HEXUS.rating

HEXUS.net scores products out of 100%, taking into account technology, implementation, stability, performance, value, customer care and desirability. A score for an average-rated product is a meaningful ‘50%’, and not ‘90%’, which is common practice for a great many other publications.

We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.

The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the card is evaluated with respect to our 'mid-range components' criteria.

HEXUS.awards

HEXUS.where2buy

The card is available, in stock, for £124.99 from Dabs.co.uk.

HEXUS.right2reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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