AMD finally managed to hit a nerve with the new Radeon HD 4000 series, as the recently released Radeon HD 4850 has set off a chain of events. First of all, because the Radeon HD 4850 is such an incredible product at $200 US, it was clear Nvidia needed a counterpart and they needed it quickly. Since they had nothing in the works, the GeForce 9800 GTX became a quick band aid, by heavily reducing its price to match the new Radeon.

Still, the Radeon HD 4850 is an impressive product, and one could easily argue that it is more impressive than a cheap GeForce 9800 GTX. Furthermore, last month it was predicted by a graphics card maker that AMD would grab 40% share of the discrete graphics card market in the third quarter of 2008, up from 30% at the start of the year. With the Radeon HD 4870 and 4870 X2 graphics cards also on the way, things continue to look up for AMD, while Nvidia are not doing nearly as well as they would have liked with the ultra expensive GeForce GTX 200 series.

With nothing new on the Nvidia roadmap, this obviously had their exclusive board partners a little worried. Therefore, soon after the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 we were not surprised to learn that Gainward had decided to offer AMD Radeon products, and we expected that more Nvidia only vendors would follow suit. For some time now we have been reviewing products from Inno3D who are also an exclusive Nvidia board partner. Recently Inno3D has started developing some very exciting new graphics cards featuring improved cooling solutions, along with some heavy factory overclocking.

Clearly Inno3D are trying to target the enthusiast market, however with the possibility of many gamers turning to the new Radeon HD 4000 series, like Gainward they could not just sit by and watch. Initially we thought that Inno3D had created a spinoff brand called Force3D, this turns out not to be the case as rather both companies just use the same manufacturer (ASK Technology). Therefore Force3D assures us that they are a completely separate company to Inno3D. At this stage we are not sure when or where consumers will be able to purchase Force3D products. Nevertheless, today we will be checking out the new Force3D Radeon HD 4850 graphics card…