Let's say your high-end desktop gaming system is built using one of ATI's Radeon HD 3870 DDR4 graphics cards. How about upgrading your graphics performance level by adding one, if not actually two ATI Radeon HD 4850 video cards? Although these cards have not been officially released yet, users should expect them to allow CrossFire setups with older generation cards, at least so if we're to trust a recent post on the Forumdeluxx.de website.

Apparently, one the forum's users has not only succeeded in getting his hands on two Radeon HD 4850 cards, but he also managed to connect the two in a CrossFireX setup, along with an additional Radeon HD 3870 card. Not only does the setup work, but it also provides an impressive 3DMark06 benchmark score, with 14,180 marks. Using just the two Radeon HD 4850 in CrossFireX, the user's system managed to score 12,300 marks under a Windows Vista 64-bit operating system.

The system was built using a Phenom 9850 Quad-Core processor clocked at 3009MHz, and was running on no less than 4GB of RAM memory. The system's CPU was cooled down by means of a liquid cooling solution. The two Radeon HD 4850 cards had a GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, while the HD 3870 card was clocked at 769MHz. All in all, this was quite an impressive feat that also managed to provide us with an important bit of information about ATI' yet to be officially released graphics cards.

Since we are talking about the very first public test of this kind, we can't know for certain whether AMD will allow the HD 4000 series to be connected in CrossFireX setup with a HD 3000 series card, as the user of the aforementioned forum did. Guess we will find that out soon enough, right after the cards hit the store shelves.