14 DAY TRIAL // After turning our attention away from the graphics monster that is Palit's yet-to-be announced Revolution 700 Deluxe, we have just found out that Sapphire has officially rolled out the new Radeon HD 4850 X2 graphics card, which has surfaced on the Internet way ahead of its release. Designed to provide users with an ultimate graphics performance, using the two, on-board HD 4850 graphics processors, the new card from Sapphire comes with a custom, dual-slot, dual-fan cooling solution.
A dual-GPU graphics card, based on ATI's high-end Radeon HD 4850 X2 solution, has been expected ever since the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker officially introduced the new dual-GPU HD 4870 X2, coming to take away NVIDIA's crown in the high-performance market segment. Sapphire, one of the leading board partners of ATI, was bound to unveil such a solution, offering users an alternative to the higher-priced 4870 X2, namely a card that was more than capable of topping NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 in terms of performance.
Talking numbers, the new HD 4850 X2 comes as two complete HD 4850 graphics cards in a single dual-slot PCI Express-enabled solution. The card delivers a total of 1600 stream processors, 800 per each GPU, and 2GB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit interface. A more affordable version of it is set to present users with only 1GB of GDDR3 memory, though offering the same 2 TeraFLOPS of GPU power. The core speed has been set at 625MHz, while that of the memory clock rate at 993MHz.
The card has also been featured with a dual-slot, dual-fan active cooler that supports a fan speed control and no less than four dual-link DVI outputs, as well as a TV-Out. Additional features include ATI's proprietary Avivo HD and CrossFire X technologies, as well as the support for Microsoft's DirectX 10.1 API, for maximum video quality and gaming experience.
Unfortunately, so far, the company hasn't provided any details regarding pricing and availability.
