The MSI R4850 is similar to many other HD4850 based graphics cards that are now out in the market. The only difference is that MSI decided to deviate from stock cooler design and gave it a bigger and better looking GPU cooler. So, if you have a transparent cabinet, this card can add some eye candy with it’s shiny copper heat pipes.

First thing first, the heart of the HD 4850 is a 55nm, RV770 chip that has 800 stream processors running at 625 MHz. You would think that the card is something that runs hot, especially since other cards that use ATI’s reference design do so. This card however, has a custom cooler, and runs cool and quiet.

A difference of 10 degrees in the temperature was noted as compared to the stock design even with the air conditioning turned off. The MSI R 4850 was able to achieve good scores in synthetic benchmarks and gaming benchmarks too. With a GPU score of 6670 in 3DMark vantage which is a strict DX 10 based GPU benchmarking utility.

In games too, it performed rather well, scoring 90, 23, 97.2, 88.4 and 82 frames in FEAR, World in Conflict, Company of Heroes, STALKER and Unreal Tournament 3 respectively at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 at maximum detail. It was even able to achieve a frame rate of 18.67 in Crysis which is a game that we know will kill all cards.

Overall, this card is a decent performer. It’s about $10 more expensive than the cards from other manufacturers with stock coolers, so it can be said that you’d be paying for the looks of this bad boy. This card can be bought from all major sellers at a reasonable price of $210.