It’s no secret that ATI has taken back the performance crown with a vengeance with their HD 4870 X2 cards, as two of the 4870s working together put together a combination that is tough to beat. But the smaller brother of the 4870 chip, the 4850 has taken the under $200 market by force with many awards and gamers buying into the new card as it offers great performance for the price it’s available at.
MSI builds video cards, motherboards and other computer components including notebooks, Slim PCs, wireless broadband routers and more. They are one of the Tier-1 Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers and have a lot of clout on the computer market due to it. Their video card division sells cards from both NVIDIA and ATI with the R4850-V101 being the card on the test bench today based upon ATI’s Radeon 4850 chip. This card has a special cooling solution that I’ll cover later in the review.
