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Just so you know if the card will fit inside your case, the card measures 11.25′ long and is 1.75′ thick with heatsinks on both sides of the card.

After stripping the shroud off, the next step for me was to pull off the heatsink and look under the cover. Four spring loaded screws hold each GPU cooler down. The first 1GB block of memory was cooled by a flat heatsink held down with 3 push pins. On the picture below, both GPU heatsinks have been stripped and the heatsink has been removed on the left bank of RAM.

There's just your usual information on the 4850 core. I was more interested in the Samsung memory modules as they'll tell me what kind of memory overclocking headroom I'll have. The make is a Samsung K4J10324QD-HJ1A and the memory has a listed maximum of 1000 MHz, just above the 993 listed on the Sapphire HD 4850 X2.

Page 5 : Installation, Overclocking & Temperatures

Installation is simple for most video cards, but when you package two cores onto one PCB, you create a long card. That's exactly the problem with the Sapphire HD 4850 X2. The 11.25′ span will make it a very tight squeeze in most cases. It's unfortunate that AMD has not updated their certified case list to ensure it fits inside your existing chassis.

When installed in my Antec 900, the card butted into the hard drive bay. Lucky for me there wasn't anything in the way. I installed the drivers that were available on the included CD – Catalyst 8.11 (8.542 RC1).

To overclock the video card, you're very limited with the Catalyst Control Center. The maximum setting is 700/1200 which isn't a lot. To maximize your potential, download the latest version of GPU-Z and AMD GPU Clock Tool. Overclocking is a manual process with AMD GPU Clock Tool as ATI Tool doesn't support the newer cards. However, get a copy as you'll want to do a stress test and make sure your new settings are stable. Slowly increase the core speed until ATI Tool's stress test starts giving you artifacts. I work in increments of 25 MHz and then 5 to fine tune. Once you have a stable core setting, do the same for the memory until you've achieved your maximum overclock. At the end of the day, I hit the wall at 720/2220. This is up from 685/1986. It's a modest gain of 5% on the core and 11.8% on the memory.

To find the maximum temperature, I opted to use FurMark. A popular OpenGL benchmark, if you don't get artifacts after 1 hour of running this badboy, your overclocked card is definitely stable. Going to the extreme, I let FurMark run for four hours and after that my temperatures were the following:

Many early reviews stated that this card is extremely loud. However, a recently received BIOS flash fixes that problem. At idle the card is just as loud as my HD 4850 IceQ, which isn't very. From the temperatures above, you shouldn't need to worry about overheating with the new BIOS even at full loud as the fan will pick up then. Just to note, all of my tests were done with the new BIOS. The old BIOS was geared towards performance but won't be representative of what's likely available in stores.

Page 6 : Test Setup

Here is a complete list of the hardware that will be used for benchmarking and was used for stress testing.

• CPU: Intel C2D Q6600 (G0 SLACR L731B434) @ 2.71 GHz
  
  
• CPU Cooling: Thermalright HR-01 w/ 120mm Antec Tri-Cool Fan
• MB: Asus P5E3-Dlx Wifi-AP Edition
• RAM: Aeneon 2x2GB XTune DDR3-1600
• PWM Cooling: Stock
• NB Cooling: Stock
• SB Cooling: Stock
• PSU: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W
• HD: Seagate SATA 250 GB 8MB NCQ
• OS: Windows Vista x64

Video Cards:

• Sapphire HD 4850 X2 Catalyst 8.11
  
  
• HIS HD4850 IceQ 4 TurboX Catalyst 8.8
• Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 Catalyst 8.8
• Diamond Multimedia HD 4850 Catalyst 8.8
• Biostar 9500GT 512MB GeForce 177.79
• BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT OC2 512MB GeForce 175.19

The benchmarks we'll take a look at include the following:

• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  
  
• Futuremark 3DMark 2006
• Futuremark 3DMark 2005
• Futuremark 3DMark 2003
• Cinebench Open GL Standard Test
• Lightsmark @ 1920×1200

Gaming Benchmarks

• Unreal Tournament III (DX 10) @ 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050
  
  
• Crysis (DX 10) @ 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050
• World in Conflict (Very High Detail) @ 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050

8X Anti-Aliasing and 8X Anisotropic Filtering Gaming Benchmarks

• Unreal Tournament III (DX 10) @ 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050
  
  
• Crysis (DX 10) @ 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050
• World in Conflict (Very High Detail) @ 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050

Page 7 : Futuremark, Cinebench & Lightsmark

The first four benchmarks I ran were from the Futuremark 3DMark family. We all know what Futuremark products are for, so I won't go over them. The graph below clearly shows the performance difference one 4850 and the X2, there's approximately a 50% gain in performance with 3D Vantage and 3D2003 but the performance increase is not as high when comparing again 3D2006 and 3D2005.

The second benchmark I looked at was Cinebench's OpenGL Standard Test. Cinebench is a real-world suite that assesses your computer's performance using Maxon's Cinema 4D software. Cinebench runs two tests but we're only interested in the second one:

The second test measures graphics card performance and is run inside the 3D editor window. The project file used can test all graphics cards that support the OpenGL standard. In this scene, only the camera was animated. This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed.

Surprisingly, it requires an overclocked 4850 X2 to beat the 8800GT OC2, only because of driver performance. You'll also notice that there's limited gain against a single 4850.

The final benchmark for this chapter is with Lightsmark, a realtime global illumination and penumbra shadows enabled benchmark.
Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?

Lightsmark is another OpenGL based benchmark so we once again see the pattern of sub-par performance on the behalf of ATI. It doesn't appear as if Lightsmark has capitalized on the dual core as performance is proportional to the single core clock speed.

While we're half done the benchmarks, the game has really only begin as we fire up some games.

Page 8 : UTIII, Crysis & World in Conflict

Video games, the real reason why so many of us spend thousands of dollars on building the ‘perfect’ PC balancing power to price. There are countless games in the world that we could play and to benchmark them all would simple take a lifetime. I have decided to compare the results between three titles, some newer than others and some more demanding than others. Starting with Unreal Tournament III, this game was released in 2007 and the Unreal Engine has been popular with many games but isn't the most demanding. Under DirectX 10 performance, we see some really high numbers, even with 8xAA and 8xAF enabled.

The Sapphire HD 4850 X2 pulls ahead by breaking the 200 FPS mark. With the overclocked card, the gain is roughly 50 FPS.

With AA and AF enabled, we really do get twice the performance out of the HD 4850 X2. We're off to a very good start with the HD 4850 X2 being able to take any settings you want to throw at it with UTIII.

Moving over to Crysis, this 2007 title uses CryEngine 2 and is the follow-up to the popular FarCry. The CryEngine 2 engine is extremely brutal, clearly making your video card the weakest link with playing Crysis or any game using the CryEngine 2 engine. The HD 4850 X2 flexes its muscle by doubling its framerate against a single HD 4850.

Even with AA and AF enabled, the HD 4850 X2 performs well and exactly where I would expect it to be given the performance without AA and AF.

The final game I benchmarked with is World in Conflict at very high detail. World in Conflict came out last year and uses the Masstech Game Engine. It's a demanding engine but not to the extent of Crysis. Given the performance of the past two games, its no surprise that the HD 4850 X2 comes out on top with another 50% gain.

Much like the single cored HD 4850, the performance drop with AA and AF enabled is minimal with WIC.

Overall, the HD 4850 X2 performed extremely well against the 8800GT and single cored HD 4850. Once again, ATI falls behind with OpenGL performance but buyers of this card certainly won't mind as the DirectX performance is simply amazing.

Page 9 : Conclusion

The Sapphire HD 4850 X2 delivers stellar performance, performance that would rival a pair of individual HD 4850s in CrossFire. Those who thought ATI was out of the graphics card market are clearly wrong. The latest family of ATI hardware has flexed some serious muscle.

One of my biggest issues with high performance is the high levels of heat generated and that often means loud cooling. I'm completely surprised by how well the HD 4850 X2 cools itself, I was skeptical that the two tiny heatsinks would be able to do the trick, especially when there's probably more metal on the shroud than with the heatsink. However, with the latest BIOS flashed onto the card, Sapphire has managed to balance performance, heat and cooling noise. I was still able to achieve a modest overclock while staying at reasonable temperatures and quiet cooling. When the fan does hit high gear, it is loud; however, when the card isn't being stressed to the max, it is actually fairly quiet – no louder than the HD 4850 IceQ I have.

One thing I didn't address in great detail is the card's HD capabilities. Sapphire has you covered with 4 DVI outputs and has even included a DVI to HDMI dongle. To top it off, the accessory pack includes DVD playback for you to fully enjoy every moment of your HD 4850 X2 when hooked up to a big screen TV. Overall, Sapphire is the first to market the HD 4850 X2 and it will certainly be a huge hit. If a single HD 4850 isn't good enough and the HD 4870 X2 is a little too rich for your blood, you will not be disappointed by the performance of Sapphire's HD 4850 X2.

Advantages

• Excellent performance
  
  
• Good cooling performance with updated BIOS
• 4 DVI output for multi-panel display
• Modest overclocking headroom

Disadvantage

• Large size may not fit all cases
  
  
• Unbearably loud without updated BIOS

Overclockers Online would like to thank Sapphire for making this review possible.

Page 10 : Sapphire 4850X2 2GB Silent Bios

Update March 14 2009
There have been many requests for the Silent BIOS I made reference to in my review.
I have uploaded the version I obtained from Sapphire to share with you:

SE87SSM.006
SE87SSS.006

These BIOS parameters will make the card much quieter – NOTE – you can install this with ATIWinFlash You must flash both master and slave BIOS before restart.

Overclockers Online takes no responsibility for any damage done to your card or system as a result of updating your BIOS. Sapphire and Overclockers Online cannot provide any support to you. These drivers were not intended for public release

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