I have been using the HD4850 for close to 2 years now. It's been a rock solid card in terms of performance. But whatever you do, buy a double slot cooler based HD4850. I suffered by buying a launch day model card with reference cooler and ran into high temp issues. I have been using it with an Accelero S1 Rev.2 mounted with a 120mm fan. The only real problem with ATI is it's buggy drivers. That's the only problem I have experienced so far. Apart from that most of the games are handled perfectly @1280x1024 and @1080p.