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As according to standard operating procedure, the first wave of this new generation of cards will all stay close to the reference board designs. Our VisionTek HD 4850 is no exception.

Adorned with an image from the great game with the worst DRM, Mass Effect, the HD4850 has a single slot cooler. While fairly long (it stretches to just shy of the end of an ATX motherboard), the HD4850 is slim, and the cooler is fairly small in comparison to some of the monsters that have been sported recently on some cards.

As for the cooler design: you have a high-speed fan situated fairly close to the GPU. The fan is a touch (just a touch) on the louder side, when running at full bore, but for most, it would probably not be heard deep within a computer case. The fan is encased by a plastic cover that stretches over a metal base plate that covers a bit less than half of the card. The card's memory also has a heatsink on it.

As cooling solutions go, this one seems to be up to the challenge of keeping your HD4850 healthy, but perhaps just barely. This card runs hot. Hot enough that you would not want to leave any digits lingering long and the exposed metal...it gets toasty indeed, which does not bode well for overclocking. Overall this cooler does the trick, but it seems likely that many of the twelve ATI partners will be releasing versions of the HD4850 with superior coolers, and probably overclocked a bit as well.

One problem with this cooler design is that an ample amount of hot air is pushed into your case -- if appearances don't mean much to you, if you install a HD 4850 with this reference design cooler, you might want to take out a placeholder bracket (or two) out of the rear of your case, around your card, in order to get some of the hot air flying out. Of course, if you have a four (or six) fan well ventilated case, than your in good shape regardless. 

It seems over the last two generations, NVIDIA and ATI are taking increasingly divergent paths in delivering great GPU's. The chart below illustrates the key specifications of the current high-end cards available, but as designs change, these specifications seem to be becoming less indicative of actual performance.