VERDICT:Overall, this card is a decent performer. It’s about Rs 500 to Rs 700 more expensive than cards from other manufacturers (with custom coolers), so we suppose you’re paying for the looks!
Cool Performer
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 the 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 its shiny copper heat pipes.
First things first, the heart of the HD 4850 is a 55NM, RV770 chip that has 800 stream processors running at a 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. We saw a difference of almost 10 degrees in the temperature as compared to the stock design, even with the air-conditioning turned off.
The MSI R 4850 was able to achieve good scores in our 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 we know will kill all cards.
