Sapphire lets out 1GB HD 3850 card

SAPPHIRE has bunged 1GB of memory on a HD 3850 card.

The gigabyte of GDDR3 memory runs at 829MHz (1.66GHz effective). The chippery itself is overclocked to 703MHz - higher than the standard reference model.

The outfit reckons extra the memory comes in handy in games or applications where large volumes of texture or data are involved.

The Sapphire HD 3850 has two high-speed connectors on each card allowing two, three or even four graphics cards to be daisy-chained, shoud you be daft enough.

As each card has two dual-link DVI connectors, up to eight monitors to be used at the same time, or - with Crossfire enabled - two GPUs and, Sapphire says, up to four with future driver releases.

The firm hasn't said how many arms and legs you'll have to sacrifice to get your hands on the one-gig card. µ