This was the original slide we saw in our Radeon HD 4870 X2 review that discussed the HD 4850 X2.  Since this was posted the specifications on the single Radeon HD 4850 X2 card that will be released have been modified just slightly to include a 650 MHz clock speed instead of the 625 MHz listed here.  There are still 1600 total shaders (800 on each GPU), 2GB of GDDR3 memory (1GB for each GPU) and 230 watt max board power rating.

We mentioned above that the Radeon HD 4850 X2 was late as well - in fact we were told during the initial R700 release that the HD 4850 X2 version of the design would be ready by mid-September but as October and then November crept up on us, there was no offering in sight.  Just a couple of weeks ago we were told to expect to get a sample of the HD 4850 X2 but that only one of AMD's partners would be offering the part: Sapphire.


Why would just one board partner be willing to offer such a compelling part?  There several factors that likely include the economic slump, the slight drop in prices on the HD 4870 X2 cards and inventory availability.  Even taking that into consideration I find it very confusing that AMD seems content to have this graphics card be such a low volume product.  With its great price (currently competing with NVIDIA's GTX 280 cards) and performance advantages (that you will see in our benchmarks) I really think the Radeon HD 4850 X2 could catch on in the enthusiast segment.