When AMD released the Radeon HD 4870 X2, the company talked about another dual GPU product designed to compete directly with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280. That product was the Radeon HD 4850 X2, but at the time AMD didn't put any kind of timeframe on the release. And in fact, when we spoke to AMD about the Radeon HD 4850 X2 about a month ago following its non-existence, we were told that it would be a partner only card and that there wouldn't be a reference design. That's fair enough we guess because it is, after all, the partners that are selling graphics cards to consumers. Now Sapphire is the first company to announce a Radeon HD 4850 X2 and it says that it is exclusive to Sapphire. - Bit-Tech

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB Style Card Preview

Maybe Sapphire has a timed exclusive on hardware in the channel or maybe the partners we'd spoken to have now been told that they're no longer allowed to release cards based on the Radeon HD 4850 X2? We don't know the full answer, but we'll endeavour to do a bit of digging. We guess we may see more partners announcing Radeon HD 4850 X2 based products over the coming weeks or months if it happens to be because of the former. The card has the same number of stream processors as the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which means there are two full RV770 GPU's under the heatsink each with 160 five-way shader units.

The clock speeds are exactly the same as a single Radeon HD 4850 as well, the core is clocked at 625MHz, while the GDDR3 memory runs at 1986MHz speeds. Interestingly, Sapphire has included 1GB of memory per GPU, instead of the 512MB on a standard Radeon HD 4850. We've heard that Sapphire is planning to release a 1GB version of the Radeon 4850 X2 in the future as well, but we don't have any pricing details for it. What's more, AMD hasn't released official drivers for Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 yet and so you'll be limited to using the pre-release drivers provided in the box until AMD introduces support officially.

Generally speaking, we're always a little cautious when it comes to dual GPU graphics cards because, even if the hardware implementation is fantastic, you're relying on software to make the card work as intended. Now, that is the case with any graphics card, without good drivers, your games will not run as well as they should. With a dual GPU graphics card like the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 though, and there is even more dependence on the drivers because the driver needs to deliver good scaling and load balancing across the two GPU's. And this is really the key point where it all comes down to for the game play experience.

As for the card, it looks to be good, but there are some natural concerns we have and one is the length, as it's longer than even the Radeon HD 4870 X2 which isn't exactly short and already has problems fitting in a number of cases. That will be amplified with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 version. Another concern we have is with the fans as they don't appear to be temperature or load controlled, so it's unlikely we'll see fan control added later down the line. We haven't looked closely at the board's noise levels yet, but our initial impressions were that it wasn't as quiet as it could be and that this could certainly be improved.

In terms of pricing, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 card is expected to retail at around $425, which puts it in roughly at the same price bracket as NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280. It competes well with NVIDIA's flagship in scenarios where the drivers work and is often faster. What's more, it's not that much slower than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in many scenarios, only when the resolution increases to current maximum will you see a more distinct difference. And this is good, considering that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is retailing at close to $550. We'd hold off until official driver support, but what we've seen so far has impressed us.