Date: December 18th, 2008
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Sapphire
 <--CLICK FOR PRICES ON A SAPPHIRE VIDEOCARD IN THE UNITED STATES
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH
Let's take a virtual walk around this rather substantial investment.
First we'll concentrate on the videocard itself. Although the base videocard is a reference HD4870 X2, the cooling solution is where this videocard separates itself from the crowd. The large waterblock cools both GPUs, eight of the sixteen 256Meg GDDR5 modules, the PLX technology bridge chip and the extremely hot power regulators which are known to work overtime on theses larger power hungry videocards. Seeing this card is overclocked right out of the box, keeping this card cool is a priority.
Besides the waterblock, you have the six and eight pin power connections and a reinforced rear PCB area. Seeing this is quite a hefty waterblock, the videocard has to be stiffened in order to stop any flexing of the PCB and therefore, not thermal breaks between the cooler and the components. It also serves as a heatsink for the rear eight additional memory modules.
Although this is indeed a true Crossfire card, Sapphire chose to only include two DVI connections and thus keep this card as a single slot solution. If you are in need of four connections, Sapphire does make an HD4850 X2 that has four DVI connections. This will be shown in an upcoming review with a months time.
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