We've never started like that before, but we're legitimately excited about this article and having the ability to write about it. Like a lot of people out there had hoped that the Radeon HD 4850 was going to be a great card for AMD, though competition is good and the last thing we want is for AMD to wither away and NVIDIA to become supreme ruler. We actually checked out the Radeon HD 4850 before we finished writing about the GeForce GTX 280, which turned out to be good news for AMD but bad news for NVIDIA. It completely changed my opinion on the GeForce GTX 280 before we had even finished. The thing is, the GeForce GTX 280 is a good card in the sense of what it's capable of. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire Version Review

The Sapphire box hasn't really changed much from past generations of cards. The top left corner of the box has the Sapphire logo and to the right of that we have a few logos which include CrossFireX and Windows Vista certification. We also have to the right that the video card is PCI Express 2.0. Of course you don't actually need a PCI Express 2.0 board, you just simply need a standard PCI Express board. Across the bottom of the box we have the model and above that we have some of the main features. We then have mention of the Ruby ROM and Sapphire including a 2GB pen drive in the package.

At first glance it doesn't look like anything too out of the ordinary. It really resembles a Radeon HD 3850 with a cooler that manages to take up the majority of the card. Towards the rear of the card we have a copper heatsink that also covers some of the more important parts on the PCB. Behind the red we can see the heatsink lay-out. As you can see, we do have a smaller fan which isn't always a good thing as they tend to push out more noise than larger ones. Taking a look around the card, it doesn't have anything that really stands out and carries the same features of ATI's last generation high-end cards.

We have a single 6-pin power connector at the back of the card while we find two CrossFire connectors across the top which we're happily making use of today. Compared to the Radeon HD 3870 card, we are up to 965 million transistors. The manufacturing process remains the same at 55nm, and the stream processors are of course way up from 320 to 800 now. Texture units are also up a huge amount from 16 to just 40 in total. The Radeon HD 4850 core speed is lower at 625MHz versus 775MHz. The 512MB of GDDR3 comes in at 2000MHz effective which is quite a healthy clock for what should be a mid-range card.

We absolutely love this card and the performance it offers. Considering stock is already available and the price is nothing short of fantastic, there isn't a whole lot not to get excited about. Sure, it's not a GeForce GTX 280 killer at all points, or even a GeForce 9800 GTX killer all the time for that matter, but the ultimate fact is that at launch these cards are going to be around the $250 mark. It's also nice to see that Sapphire has thought outside the box, for inside the box there is the addition of a 2GB pen drive, which is always handy to have. They seem to be one of those devices that you keep meaning to get, but just never get around to it.

Plus if you end up going CrossFire, you can end up with two which is certainly more helpful than two copies of the same game really. If the Radeon HD 4850 is anything to go by, the Radeon HD 4870 should also be a real winner for people with deeper pockets. The other thing is the fact that Intel support CrossFire, and this is AMD's biggest strength. You have to think if the Intel X48 chipset was an SLI motherboard, what would our thoughts be on the card? Fortunately, it's not so we don't have to worry about that and we can continue to have our borderline scary love for the new ATI model.

There are a few other things that are worth noting. The GeForce GTX 280 from Zotac was overclocked along with the BFG GeForce 9800 GTX OCX, making the HD Radeon HD 4850's again look even more attractive. We suppose all we have to do now is wait for all the ATI partners who have been doing nothing but sitting on their hands to release some cool models over the coming weeks or months. No doubt Sapphire are hard at work on an Atomic or Ultimate models and more.