I'm thinking about jumping ship to ATI in a month or two. I've got the 4890 in my sights, but I don't know much about the manufacturers. I'm considering XFX (which I've heard good things about), Sapphire and and HIS. If any of you have experience with the awesome EVGA, I'm looking for an ATI equivalent

Why not a 5850?

My shop building my rig recommended a Sapphire ATI.

I chose Asus because it has a voltage tweak app that works with it's drivers that wring's more perf out of its cards then the other guys.

Same reason I went with BFG for Nvidia. They have factory OC'd cards.

My personal experience, in terms of reliability, points to Asus.
The only time I moved away from Asus was with Sapphire. But the graphic card had a problem after 1 year and had to RMA. Since than I'm very reluctant to change from Asus (never had any problem).

ASUS = extremely reliable. Excellent QC.

BFG = nearly as good.

XFX = I've heard a lot of bad stuff regarding their quality. Lots of RMAs.

Sapphire = Pretty good, but not nearly as good as ASUS.

pfunk

This may not add much of value after PFunk's comment.

I buy the cheapest reference design card the day I buy (I've had Sapphire, PowerColor, HIS recently).

If they are all selling at virtually the same price I would consider ASUS, Sapphire, Powercolor first.

You can go with an HD4890 as my HD4870 plays everything I throw at it -- with max or near max settings.

One advantage of going "cheap" now is that the DX11 games will be in full force by 2011 (only a year+ away). By then not only will the Nvidia G300 series be available, but ATI will have moved to its next major generation (the HD5xxx is the last of the current generation). Thus, one could upgrade then to an expensive card and have it last a good while. That's my plan -- if I can resist the temptation to upgrade that long

For ATI:

ASUS

Sapphire

XFX


HIS seems to be pretty good to. They usually install better heat sinks and fans for better cooling.

Thanks a lot for the advice all! Especially advising me on what's coming up in the ATI gpu line