This is probably the best moment to be an ATI board partner, as the company continues to regain the ground it lost to competitor NVIDIA, with its Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards. It is because of these cards' performance potential and relatively affordable price range that most graphics card manufacturers don't just settle for releasing cards that provide the user with a reference design.

Instead, we are seeing more Radeon graphics cards that either integrate a custom cooling solution or come factory overclocked, straight out of the box. One such example is the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4850, which is offered with a factory overclocked GPU and 512MB of GDDR4 memory.

 

The card has been specifically designed to further boost its performance potential with the help of a custom cooler, GDDR4 RAM memory and an overclocked GPU. All that comes in a card that will take up two of your motherboard's graphics lanes, because of its dual-slot fansink cooler, the Professional Cooling System (PCS), designed by ZEROtherm. It is this PCS solution that is meant to ease temperatures on the card's factory overclocked GPU.

 

In terms of technical specifications, the HD 4850 PCS+ with 512MB of GDDR4 memory is featured with an RV770 GPU clocked at 675MHz, a 50MHz increase from the 625MHz on basic models, while the memory has also been overclocked to 2200MHz, up from 1986MHz. These higher clock rates and the integration of the faster GDDR4 memory modules are bound to provide a boost of performance compared with reference designs.

 

Also, if you are considering an upgrade to your desktop gaming rig, keep in mind that this is a Radeon graphics card and that it comes with support for ATI's technologies, including CrossFireX and DirectX 10.1, a feature that you will not find on any card from NVIDIA's current GeForce graphics lineup. Unfortunately, we don't have any pricing and availability details at this time, but the card is bound to make its debut in stores before this year's winter holidays.