When ATI released their stellar HD 4000 series this past summer, the first question we had to ask was, "Where's the duals?" Indeed, their launch cards took everyone by surprise, including NVIDIA, so to imagine two such GPUs on one card sounded very drool-worthy. Luckily, we didn't have to wait too long to be treated to the first X2 of the 4000 series.

In August, when the HD 4870 X2 was released, we didn't know much about the HD 4850 X2 and it's no surprise. The HD 4870 X2 offered incredible performance and became a popular choice for high-end gamers, so it's easy to see why ATI didn't want to follow-up with a lesser-performing and lesser-expensive card too quickly.

But, that wait lasted only a few months, and we were greeted by the first HD 4850 X2 on the market this past November, courtesy of Sapphire. I'm unsure of the reasoning behind it, but Sapphire is the only manufacturer to offer such a model. I assume this was thanks to an exclusive partnership with ATI, and partially because not too many other companies were keen on releasing the model themselves. This is what I have gathered from talking to certain vendors in the past few months.

You can read the entire article at Techgage.