Sapphire launches dual HD4850

FIRST SPOTTED lurking on a Chinese website here, the Sapphire HD 4850 X2 is now a reality.

The new dual GPU graphics accelerator comprises two complete HD 4850 graphics systems on a single PCI-Express card connected by an on-board PCI Express Gen 2 bridge chip.

Each GPU has 800 stream process units and a 256-bit memory interface driving 1GB of GDDR3 memory, making a total of 2GB on-board memory.

Four Dual Link DVI outputs are provided as well as TV-Out. This provides a choice of multi-monitor operation or Crossfire mode in which 3D applications such as games use both on-board GPUs together to deliver a single accelerated output on the Primary display.

The hardware sits on a single ATX format PCI-Express card, with a dual fan assisted cooler making it a standard dual-slot configuration. It's even better news if you have two free PCI slots as you can cram two of these babies using Crossfire mode and really get the frame rates up.

Other onboard gubbins includes ATI Avivo HD video, a second UVD (Unified Video decoder) for the hardware accelerated decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H.264 codecs and supports HDMI over the DVI interface with the HDMI Adapter supplied.

Sapphire tells us the card will be on sale from today (although we can't find them anywhere) for around £270.

There's a whole heap of numbers and in-depth techie stuff over at Hexus or Custom PC if that sort of thing floats yer boat. µ