Sapphire HD 4850 X2 Video Card Review

Introduction (Cont’d)

This video card requires the installation of one 6-pin auxiliary power connector and one 8-pin auxiliary power connector. If your power supply doesn’t have these connectors don’t worry: the video card comes with adapters.

Figure 5: Auxiliary power connectors.

In Figure 5, you can see the video card with its cooler removed. As you can see, it uses individual aluminum heatsinks with copper base on the GPUs and aluminum passive heatsinks on the memory chips. Also notice how this video card uses only solid aluminum capacitors, which are the best kind of electrolytic capacitor.

Figure 6: Video card with its cooler removed.

The reviewed video card has eight 1 Gbit GDDR3 memory chips from Samsung (K4J10324QD-HJ1A) around each GPU, making its 1 GB per GPU or 2 GB total. These chips support up to 1 GHz (2 GHz DDR), so there is no margin for you to overclock the memories with them still inside their specs. Of course you can try overclocking them above their labeled maximum clock rate.

In Figure 7, you can see all accessories and CDs/DVDs that come with this video card. With the accessories that come with this card you can convert the video output to VGA, HDMI, component video and composite video, plus the DVI and S-Video connectors already present on the product.

Figure 7: Accessories.

This video card comes with three games inside a DVD called “Ruby ROM 1.1”: Call of Juarez, Dungeon Runners and Stranglehold. Programs that come with this video card include CyberLink DVD Suite (PowerProducer 4, PorwerDirector 5 Express, Power2GO 5.5, Mediashow 3 and trial versions of PowerBackup 2.5, PowerDVD Copy and LabelPrint 2), Cyberlink Power DVD 7, 3DMark Vantage Full, EarthSim and GameShadow.

Now let’s compare the Radeon HD 4850 X2 specifications to the specs of all other video cards included in our comparison.