| Sapphire Radeon HD4850 X2 2048MB Graphics Card
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Sapphire is back again with another specialty graphics card based on a high end ATI Radeon GPU. The newly released Sapphire Radeon HD4850 X2 2048MB graphics card incorporates a pair of Radeon HD4850 graphics processors and 2048MB of GDDR3 memory on a custom PCB to create one serious looking piece of equipment. The promotional image below shows the card in question, and in this review we'll take a closer look to see how it compares to some other high end cards in the Radeon family.
Before getting into the heart of the review, let's take a look at some published data on the Sapphire Radeon HD4850 X2 2048MB. The bullet points below cover some of the key items, and for a complete list of features and specifications, please visit the official product page on the Sapphire website.
Features:
» 2 GB of GDDR3 memory
» 2.0 TeraFLOPS of GPU power
» DirectX 10.1 support
» PCI Express 2.0 support
» 1600 stream processing units
» 2 x 256-bit memory interface
» 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
» Dual mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
» Dynamic geometry acceleration & DVD Upscaling
» Game physics processing capability & Dynamic Contrast
» ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
» Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
» Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
» Accelerated Video Transcoding(AVT)
» Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
Specifications:
» Display Output: Dual DL-DVI-I+HDTV
» Core Clock: 625 MHz
» Stream Processors: 2 x 800
» Memory Clock: 993MHz, 1986 Mbps
» PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
» 2x 1024MB / 2x256bit GDDR3 memory interface
» Dual Slot Dual Fan Active Cooler with Fan Speed Control
» HDMI compliant via dongle
» 7.1 Audio Channel Support
» Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
» Shader Model 4.1 support
The core and memory clock speeds are both set to the reference Radeon HD4850 settings, but the obviously appeal is that you have the horsepower of two cards on a single PCB. Each graphics processor has 1024MB of memory to work with, and the theoretical bandwidth is double what you would get with just one card.
While this Radeon HD4850 X2 offers high end features and specifications, it is not the top of the line since there are Radeon HD4870 X2 cards available from Sapphire and a few other manufacturers. The Radeon HD4850 X2 costs a good deal less than its "big brother" (roughly $400 versus $550), and is intended to compete with NVIDIA based cards in terms of performance and price.
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