We have to say we really like the Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic - the cooling solution performs incredibly well and the PCB redesign has enabled Palit to keep the price of this card down at around £120 (inc. VAT), which makes it an attractive proposition considering the factory overclock. Of course, it would have been nice of Palit to overclock the memory a big further, but we understand why it hasn't done this - all of the Radeon HD 4850s we've seen have been able to run at clock speeds in excess of 685MHz, but memory is a little harder to guarantee to certain clock speeds without bumping the price up.

The direct competition really comes from the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+, which is the same price, and the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX that is still unavailable and hasn't dropped in price despite hearing rumblings of a slight tweak happening. The Powercolor is outperformed in just about every scenario by the Palit and it's the same price. The HIS, on the other hand, performs better still but it's £15 more.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is the closest competition from Nvidia, but they're not available for anything less than £125 (inc. VAT) and the 4850 is a better performer in the tests we've run; it's without doubt our preferred choice at this price point even if the Nvidia offerings deliver better performance in //Crysis. When it comes down to it, the 4850 delivers playable frame rates at exactly the same resolution, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings as the 9800 GTX+ in this title, so it makes the frame rate advantage less of an importance in our opinion.

On the whole then, Palit's Radeon HD 4850 Sonic is a great option and one that we'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone looking for some serious bang for buck at just over £120.