Before Nvidia gets to pass the performance crown to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, AMD's partners have just enough time to start shipping non-reference HD 4850 and 4870 cards. One such example can be viewed below and is Sapphire's 1GB-equipped Radeon HD 4850. In addition to the extra 512MB of on-board memory, the upcoming card features a lovely and not at all blasphemous blue PCB and a single-slot cooling solution that seems to be 'stock' with the exception of the face plate.

Also offering CrossFireX support, the 1GB DirectX 10.1-supporting card has a 55nm RV770 GPU clocked at a standard 625 MHz and 1996 MHz memory. Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 1GB should reach the stores before the end of the month.






Pictures courtesy of vga.zol.com.cn.