Well? Can someone tell me the difference between what appears to me to be slightly different variants of the same card?

Erm, the sticker on the card, and sometimes clock speeds. Very rarely the heatsink. Oh, and they could have different amounts of GRAM. Just read the descriptions and some internet reviews.

P.S. I take it this means you want a new graphics card? How much you looking to spend?

Sapphire is a big brand for Ati, kinda like eVGA
if you want more names: Palit/Xpertvision,XFX,BFG,Gigabyte,Daimond,Visiontek,Powercolor
i think the main difference is the GPU coolers in these cards

There were reviews of two of them in PCG, the Sapphire one and the MSI one.

The Sapphire one was apparently both slightly faster and slightly cheaper.

When was this review? If it was recent they're about a year late

But anyway, generally speaking, if the cards are the same core and have the same clocks and memory, they will perform the same. There is a margin of error as the chips aren't actually created equally (some will be better, some will be worse), but they'll all perform within about 5% of each other, and no manufacturer gets the better chips.

I just buy the cheapest card of the chip, or an overclocked one if they're not too much more expensive (maybe on with a different cooler or nice bundle).

Topic title corrected. It was the 4850 I'm after, not the 3850. >.<

I should've noticed that. :<

Ah, good choice

The main difference will be the bundle and presentation. Some have different coolers and clocks but you'll notice the difference because of the price. The 4850's have only recently been allowed to have AIB's create custom PCB's... PowerColor are having a lot of problems with their PCS 4870 because of stability issues for example.

If you go with stock, you won't go wrong.

Stock? As in a 'stock' card, a standard one? Could you give me an example?

I feel a bit out of my depth here for not understanding AIB's, PCB's. and PCS.

me neither, have pity on us skillers, azcn O_O

OK, a stock card is a standard or reference card. It's any one of the cards that comes with standard (reference) frequencies and cooler.

AIB stands for Add-in Board Vendor, examples are Gigabyte, PowerColor, HIS etc.
PCB stands for Printed Circuit Board, it's the 'card' part of the card and is supplied by the AIB
PCS stands for Professional Cooling Solution from PowerColor. These cards are non-standard because they have higher clock speeds and a different cooler

Ok, how do I get a stock version? All I can find are these so-called AIB versions.

This is a stock card. All stock cards will look like this, except they will have different stickers on the heatsink.

This and this aren't stock cards.

How on earth do I tell the difference between stock versions and new versions??

The third one is easy to separate, as it's called the 'Toxic Edition'.

However other than that, how do I tell them apart?

they will probably have things like OC and XXX at the end of the name

Look at the pictures. The first one is standard, down to the heatsink. The only difference with another stock card will be the sticker on the card.

Also, check the frequencies!

If you are not sure what the default frequencies are, just keep an eye on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... .29_series

If the specification deviates from that then you're getting a non reference card for sure.

So I'm looking for the HD 4850 with a core clock rate of 625MHz memory clock rate 993MHz

The clock rate's the rate it does calculations isn't it?

And if I find a version of the card with those clock rates altered it's most probably going to be higher, because the card will have been overclocked, correct?

That is it precisely my friend

Ah, excellent!

Now for some bargain hunting...

The cheapest you will get one will be about £110. I'm thinking this will be the cheapest as you don't have to pay postage.

At this rate half of TCHS are going to have 4850s (or 48xxs, seeing as I'm getting a 4870 soon and Aaron has 4870X2s, lol).

That's the PowerColor one not the Sapphire one.

It's the cheapest available HD4850. This is the Sapphire one, but any difference in performance between them will be down to luck. They are built to exactly the same specification, just the nature of such cards means that every card will have a slightly different performance (just like processors overclock differently).

You save £6 with the PowerColor one, at no loss.