Last week, Advanced Micro Devices' graphics unit ATI launched another card from its Radeon HD 4800 series, the HD 4830. The entire series seems to be selling quite well, and it also looks very good both on paper and in benchmarks. The list of the top 10 selling graphics cards in the U.S. retail market is still dominated by NVIDIA's solutions, yet the HD 4850 and 4870 boards seem quite strong, and some of the best selling graphics cards feature much lower price points than these models.

NPD recently released retail sales numbers, and they show Visiontek’s Radeon 4850 HD as the best selling graphics card in September this year, with a total of 4197 units. The second place went to PNY’s GeForce 8500 GT (512 MB DDR2), which marked 4106 units sold, while the third place was occupied by PNY’s GeForce 8800 GT (512 MB GDDR3) with 3080 units.

Seven of the top 10 selling cards went to NVIDIA, with total unit shipments of 21,414. AMD was well behind, with a total of 9758 units sold, as Visontek’s Radeon HD 4870 placed fifth with 3052 units and Asustek’s Radeon HD 4850 came tenth with only 2509 units sold. As most of you probably know, 4850 cards go for about $160, while the 4870 is placed above $270. NVIDIA’s cards placed on the top ten can be usually found well bellow that, the only exception being PNY’s 8800GT at the third position which occasionally goes above $150 in U.S. retail. EVGA also has a 9800GT card which was placed eighth with 2634 units and it’s selling at more than $100 in some stores.

The entire list of the top ten selling graphics cards would look like this:

1. Visiontek 512MB GDDR3 ATI Radeon HD 4850 PCIE-X16 2.0 with 4197 (units)
2. PNY 512MB DDR2 Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT PCIE-X16 with 4106
3. PNY 512MB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT PCIE-X16 2.0 with 3080
4. BFG 512MB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS PCIE-X16 with 3079
5. Visiontek 512MB GDDR5 ATI Radeon HD 4870 PCIE-X16 2.0 with 3052
6. EVGA 384MB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce 9600 GSO PCIE-X16 with 3011
7. EVGA 256MB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT PCIE-X16 with 2670
8. EVGA 512MB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT PCIE-X16 2.0 with 2634
9. EVGA 512MB GDDR3 Nvidia 8800 GT PCIE with 2561
10. Asustek 512MB GDDR3 ATI Radeon HD 4850 PCIE-X16 2.0 with 2509.