Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 Review

Sapphire has been making some of the best ATI-based video cards for a while, and the Sapphire 4850 X2 is no exception.  The board is well constructed, and the heatsinks are better than what you expect for OEM.  Because of the layout of the board (namely the bridge chip in the center), you will be limited on the third-party heatsinks that will fit.

The board absolutely screams past competition from nVidia, but only in games that fully support Crossfire mode.  If you’re buying this card to get the best numbers on Crysis or Far Cry 2, then you’ll have to wait until the games are patched to take advantage of it.  (nVidia’s SLI doesn’t currently work in these games, either).

For the many games that do work, you’ll see a big jump in FPS that will certainly earn the envy of your friends.  You’ll have to disable Crossfire mode in some games to get slightly higher FPS, and in these cases a single-GPU video card (like the Sapphire 4870 Toxic) is faster.  If it weren’t for this incompatibility issue, then we would have awarded a full 5 points in the Performance category, which would have given this card our rare “Perfect” award badge.

The 4850 X2 should be considered by graphics professionals, too.  It is one of the few PC video products that offer 4 DVI outputs on one card.  Normally you have to order a special 4-headed video card to drive a quad-monitor desktop, and these specialty cards usually come with several caveats.  Choosing the 4850 X2 gives you quad-monitor support while still having great compatibility for games and OpenGL (like Photoshop’s CS4 suite).

The 4850 X2 card offers some of the best performance for the price ratio.  At an MSRP of $400 you get a card that can outperform nVidia’s current flagship, the GeForce GTX 280. This card is also $200 cheaper than the 4870 X2 card, and offers performance that is rather close. The Sapphire 4850 X2 has performance unheard of in its price range, and is the new sweet spot for PC gaming enthusiasts.

	REPORT CARD : Sapphire HD 4850 X2 category rating comments Quality 5 Well constructed board and heatsinks Innovation 5 Crossfire on one board with minimal problems. 4 DVI! Performance 4 Easily outperforms competitors, but doesn’t benefit some modern games without patches. Installation 5 Little configuration necessary to get working.  Just click one checkbox to toggle Crossfire mode. Value 5 Currently the best performance for the price. FINAL VERDICT: 5 out of 5 stars