Sapphire has chosen not to use the Radeon HD 4870 X2's reference design PCB-probably because of the different traces required from the GPU(s) to memory-and has instead opted for its own design.
#Ati radeon 4850 vs amd radeon hd 6520g full
With all of this in mind, we have tested the card in a couple of games to give you an idea of what to expect – there will be a full review as soon as we've got all of the above out of the way.
#Ati radeon 4850 vs amd radeon hd 6520g drivers
Sapphire tells us that official driver support is forthcoming but whether it'll be the Catalyst 8.11 or 8.12 drivers that add the 4850 X2 isn't clear at the moment. These drivers are, to be frank, a little flaky in some scenarios so we feel it's better to hold back before really gauging how well the Radeon HD 4850 X2 performs. What's more, AMD hasn't released official drivers for Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 yet and so you'll be limited to using the pre-release drivers provided in the box until AMD introduces support in the official Catalysts. Since the card arrived particularly late last week and the fact we're in the process of introducing some of the latest games to our test suite, while also re-tooling our graphics card testing systems with a couple of Core i7-equipped X58 motherboards, we haven't had time to give this card the full review it deserves. Interestingly, Sapphire has included 1GB of memory per GPU, instead of the 512MB on a standard 4850 – we've heard that Sapphire is planning to release a 1GB version of the 4850 X2 in the future as well, but we don't have any pricing details for it. The clock speeds are exactly the same as a single Radeon HD 4850 as well – the core is clocked at 625MHz, while the GDDR3 memory runs at 1,986MHz. The card has the same number of stream processors as the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which means there are two 'full' RV770 GPUs under the heatsink each with 160 five-way shader units (making a total of 1,600 stream processors over the two GPUs). Maybe Sapphire has a timed exclusive on hardware in the channel or maybe the partners we'd spoken to have now been told that they're no longer allowed to release cards based on the Radeon HD 4850 X2? I don't know the full answer, but I'll endeavour to do a bit of digging – I guess we may see more partners announcing Radeon HD 4850 X2 based products over the coming weeks or months if it happens to be because of the former. Sapphire is the first company to announce a Radeon HD 4850 X2 and it says that it is " exclusive to Sapphire." This is something that occasionally happens, but Sapphire wasn't the first add-in-board partner to talk to us about the 4850 X2 – it was merely the first to get hardware to us. That's fair enough I guess because it is, after all, the partners that are selling graphics cards to consumers – or at least that's the case in the UK. In fact, when I spoke to AMD about the Radeon HD 4850 X2 about a month ago following its non-existence, I was told that it would be a "partner-only" card and that there wouldn't be a reference design. That product was the Radeon HD 4850 X2, but at the time AMD didn't put any kind of timeframe on the release. When AMD released the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, the company talked about another dual-GPU product designed to compete directly with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280.
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