Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 pictured

Posted at: 4:00pm 29th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Sapphire reveals the first Radeon HD 4850 X2, which AMD claims is still faster than a GeForce GTX 280

AMD first told us about its plans to release Radeon HD 4850 X2 cards back in August, but months later they’re starting to look about as real as Duke Nukem Forever. However, Sapphire has proved that Radeon HD 4850 X2 cards are indeed in the works with these photos.

According to AMD, the cards will be positioned just above the GeForce GTX 280 in terms of performance, and cards with the standard specs will feature two Radeon HD 4850 GPUs clocked at 625MHz and 2GB of 1GHz (2GHz effective) GDDR3 memory. Despite having two GPUs, AMD also says that the cards will not consume any more than 230W at full load.

Interestingly, the Sapphire card also has four DVI ports rather than the two found on standard 4870 X2 cards, suggesting that the card has two outputs for each GPU. However, this will prevent the card from exhausting heat directly through the back of the case, as it doesn’t have the venting system found on the standard Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards.

The card also has two PCI-E power connectors; one with eight pins and one with six pins. Meanwhile, a CrossFire connector at the top will allow you to setup a quad CrossFireX system with a second card. Although no UK pricing has been announced yet, AMD estimates that the cards will cost less than $400 US (£245), which would make them a fair bit cheaper than Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, which currently cost around £350.

Would you be interested in a dual-GPU Radeon HD 4850 X2 card, or would you rather go for a single-GPU GeForce GTX 280? Let us know your thoughts.