We have all more than likely seen or heard about the Radeon HD 4850 video card that ATI and Sapphire released so they would have a decent video card in the sub-$150 region for those people that could not swing the money to purchase a single Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 4850 card offered a very viable option for those that wanted a card where they could play a large number of the current games available albeit at reduced resolution and also a card that would be ideal for their home theater PC. Today all video cards including the cheaper ones be it ATI or NVIDIA have the capability to handle decoding of Blu-ray quality without a hitch, making the Radeon HD 4850 the perfect card. - Hi-Tech Reviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB Dual Cores Review

What happens when you take two Radeon HD 4850 video cards, add memory to them to total 2GB and then mount all of this on a single board. You end up with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 edition. This is the card that is designed to give the hungry gamer a video card they can use if they are unable to afford the more expensive Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. Designed by Sapphire, the new Radeon HD 4850 X2 comprises two complete Radeon HD 4850 graphics systems on a single PCI Express card connected by an on-board PCI Express bridge chip to let these work together and deliver higher gaming performance.

Each GPU has 800 stream process units and a 256-bit memory interface driving 1GB of GDDR3 memory, making a total of 2GB on-board memory. Four dual link DVI outputs are provided as well as a TV output. This provides a choice of multi monitor operation or CrossFire mode in which 3D applications such as games use both on-board GPU's together to deliver a single accelerated output on the primary display with industry leading levels of performance. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 comes with what we would describe as a premium package. It includes not only the drivers CD, it also includes some retail software bundle.

Looking at the front of the shipping carton you immediately recognize Rudy wielding a pair kantata fighting swords. The colors and graphics used on the cartons are typical of most of Sapphires cards as they stay pretty close to the color scheme that ATI has used for a very long time. The front of the carton has a large amount of information to read if one takes the time to do so. Moving to the rear of the carton we find the features of the card which we are not going to list since we have provided the majority of the information prior to this. One of the key features of this video card is the fact that it has DirectX 10.1 support.

The team of ATI have done it again with a CrossFire video card that very well may be in the reach of those that do not have the funds to purchase the Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. And no, this card will not bring you scores equal to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, but it will allow you to play just about any video game on the market today and enjoy on medium or higher graphics settings. With this card running in neighborhood of about $300 we feel that this board offers a excellent price to performance ratio and if you can't afford the higher X2 series this card is a very good replacement for your 3D gaming experience.

So it is our hope that AMD will continue to bring cards to market that are equal in speed and quality of performance of the NVIDIA counterparts since we all know competition is what brings the price down for both brands. This time it was though Sapphire that did swing ATI over to actually go for this second dual GPU version based upon the Radeon HD 4850 processing logic.