For my case, the stock cooler is doing the job pretty much fine. With some manual fan speed controlling or flash the bios, the 4850 idling at around 48-52c depends on ambient temp and full load at 70-80c.

The GC is not tat fragile against the high temperature, if you want to extend the lifespan of the GC with "low" temperature, you might as well buy a mid range card and keep on upgrading them every 2 years or so if you have the budget.

For OC, I can't gain much FPS from 625mhz core to 700mhz in crysis, just around 2-3FPS increment can't really motivate me to stick with that clock speed. Currently, only crysis requires insane GPU processing power while other new titles such as Far Cry 2 runs fine on my 4850.

IMO, not really worth to get the OC-ed version card, unless you are loaded with cash

You have 4800 series as well. It's still the same what, right ? Anyway, I'm very satisfied with this card. hehehe....

for customer to be noob in pc hardware stuff it shouldn't be a major prob but still a wise customer should survey/preview the items b4 the buy them...

but for a seller, that is unforgiven...they should have more knowledge about the stuff they are selling...