Date: February 25th, 2009
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Sapphire
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH
Let's take a virtual walk around Sapphire's Radeon HD4850 X2.
First off we start at this videocard's dual VPUs. Sapphire's use of the 55nm manufactured RV770 Pro core is clocked in at 625Mhz for the two cores and 993Mhz for the memory. This is much like their standard HD4850, but with the added core. Seeing this is a very conservative clock, we are hoping there will is a little headroom when it comes to overclocking. But even in its standard form, it has double the memory bandwidth and pipelines of its single core variety and unlocks a sizable increase in performance. How much more will be laid out in the benchmarking.
As for the cooler, seeing this card is enormous, it also has an enormous cooler. With two 70mm fans pushing air down onto an all aluminum heatsink which covers the memory and the two cores, it has quite a job trying to keep this card cool. The only thing with this cooler is I wish they machined slots in the black cover to allow the fans to get rid of the hot air more efficiently. In this config, it does suffer from some heat saturation which does affect the overclocking. But even so, it still cools it appropriately in it stock form.
All voltage regulators are cooled both on the top and the bottom of the card. Seeing this card does use a lot of power for one single PCB, keeping these regulator chips cool is paramount to keeping this card stable and allow it to have a long product life. Seeing it needs so much power, you will need to use a power supply that provides a six and eight pin connect to feed this beast. If you power supply doesn't have those connections, the hardware kit does come with come converters for your standard 4 pin molex connection.
The back of the card is simple and unobstructed other than the heatsink on the voltage regulators. But still keep in mind that even though there will be little interference with the northbridge cooler, this card could interfere with the memory slots or other connections on the right hand side of the motherboard.
This is something you don't see very often. native quad monitor support is a hard thing to come buy even with other dual core cards. Although I know 99% of people won't use any other than maybe two of them, it's good to know that it supports it. The other connection is for the HD component video output.
