jmke

OH. MY. GOD. That was my initial reaction when looking upon the new Sapphire HD 4850 X2 video card.

nVidia and ATI are constantly feuding. These bitter PR battles have resulted in a new more powerful video cards every six months or so. This is both good news and bad news for PC gaming enthusiasts. On one hand, prices are kept in check because of the fierce competition. On the other hand, performance increases so frequently that your shiny new card is obsoleted very quickly.

As soon as one manufacturer releases the new King of Performance, then the other regroups and develops a product to dethrone its competition. ATI was not sittting idly by during the latest generation of video products. nVidia's GeForce GTX 280 video card is one of the top performing (and most expensive) video cards, so ATI unleashed their 4870 X2 card to defeat it.

http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=1397

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jmke

Today we are going to look at the HD4850 X2, an exclusive beast from Sapphire set to slot in directly below the class leading 4870 X2, a card which has scooped our highest awards in several reviews. We have high hopes for the new Sapphire board as the single core 4850 has been a big success in the enthusiast market with a potent combination of great value for money and strong performance.

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=657

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jmke

ATI has learned that being the king of graphics means you must raise the bar for performance with each product release. The Radeon HD 4850 X2 is the latest evolution in graphics cards, and ATI delivers a product nearly as grand as their Radeon HD 4870 X2. Benchmark Reviews has been fortunate to test the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 Dual-GPU video card 11139-00-40R against a collection of todays hottest video cards available.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...244&Item id=1

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jmke

Viewing your HD content has never been easier with the addition of support for four different monitors at one time. The last card I have seen to feature four DVI outputs was the Asus EAH3870X2. If you have plans on using this card with an HDMI output you can with the supplied DVI to HDMI dongle. To further expand on the HD aspect of this card, Sapphire has included an accessory pack that includes several suites of software from Cyberlink as well as a licensed copy of the latest benchmark from Futuremark. With pricing suggested in the $350 range, this card is right around the price of two separate HD4850 cards. If the Big Dog HD4870x2 is a little rich for your blood, then the Sapphire HD4850x2 will fit both the price and performance requirements for the vast majority of the public. The performance was a surprise.

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...pphire_4850x2/

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jmke

We've already mentioned that a reference Radeon HD 4850 X2 sticks with the clock speeds allocated to a reference Radeon HD 4850, and Sapphire's board sticks to these speeds, giving us clocks of 625MHz and 993MHz for core and memory speed respectively.

The first big surprise comes from taking a look at the length of this board's PCB - Put simply, it's bigger than both the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 280 at around 11.5 inches long (compared to 10.5" for those other parts). Make sure you have plenty of room in your case before picking up one of these monsters; we only just managed to squeeze it into our Cooler Master 690 chassis that we use for testing here.

The board also comes with a huge cooler strapped to it, sporting two fans to pull air into that large heatsink, although unfortunately due to the design of the board hot air can't be exhausted out of the rear of the chassis.

http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/ind...33&Item id=27

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jmke

Being priced at reasonable $419, the Sapphire HD 4850 X2 is designed to take some market share from NVIDIA's GTX 280. The card features 2 GB of GDDR3 memory and comes with a custom designed cooling solution. Even though you would expect very little overclocking from a dual-GPU card, we saw an amazing 15% performance increase from overclocking without touching any fan settings.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_4850_X2

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jmke

!!!

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