The Card

With the package out of the way, it's time to have a look at the card itself. Since there is no reference design, Sapphire has been able to do what they want with the cooler. Pulling the card out of the box, it's nice to see a dual fan design.

We all know that as great as the HD 4850 is, the biggest problem with it is the huge amount of heat coming off the back of the card with the single slot cooler. We can see to the right of the cooler we have the model again along with the Sapphire logo.

Looking around the card, there isn't anything too unexpected. Like any high-end card, we have two power connectors located at the back; in this case a single 6-pin and single 8-pin one.

Towards the front of the card also features a single Crossfire connector; this gives us the ability to place two of these cards together like the HD 4870 X2 to give us a maximum of four HD 4850 cores.

It doesn't come as any surprise that the card is dual slot, but what's interesting is the fact that Sapphire has not only decided to have two DVI connectors on the card, but include an additional two. Alongside these we also have a single TV-Out connector located towards the bottom of the card.

Specifications

As far as specifications go, there isn't anything we didn't expect to see. The HD 4850 X2 is literally two HD 4850s on a single PCB; clocks are the same between the single and dual GPU cards with a 625MHz core and 1986MHz memory clock.

We have the same 256-bit memory interface, but the card is doubled with it, being advertised as 512-bit. The HD 4850 X2 from Sapphire is going to be available in two versions, a 1GB model and the 2GB model we have with us today.