Following recent rumour that AMD are planning to release a lower spec'd version of the popular HD 3870 X2 graphics card, ASUS has become the first partner to confirm this with an official announcement showing off the world's first HD 3850 X2 offering.

Dubbed the "EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G", the card is designed near identically to its bigger brother, but with lower clockrates of 668MHz on the core and 1658MHz on the 1GB of GDDR3 memory. Pricing isn't yet known, but given where the 3870 X2 currently sits it should be an attractive alternative for those looking to go Crossfire on a budget.

Taipei, Taiwan, April 3, 2008 - Catering to users who want to enjoy outstanding graphical performance, ASUS, producer of top quality graphic solutions, has today unveiled the world's first on-board dual HD3850 graphics card with the ASUS EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G. Equipped with two HD3850 GPUs, an astonishing 34% and 5% improvement in speeds can be achieved when compared to single-GPU solutions and two single-GPU Crossfire configured graphics cards respectively.

The EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G also comes specially designed with dual fansinks for both GPUs - ensuring efficient heat dissipation for more stable operations. On top of all this, the ASUS EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G is equipped with a large onboard memory size of 1GB - designed to provide feature-rich DirectX 10 gaming and the best multimedia playback without any lagging at ultra-high resolutions and maximum quality settings.