Sapphire packs Crossfire on one graphics card

Twin-processor card paves way for quad-crossfire

Sapphire has announced a single graphics card packing two ATI GPUs, following in the footsteps of Nvidia's popular dual-GPU 7950GX2 graphics card.

The Sapphire X1950 Pro DUAL, which was shown at CES, has has two R570 processing units, which are not as fast ATI's top-end R580+ units found in the X1950XTXs.

The card occupies a single x16 PCI Express slot and resembles the previous X1950 Pro Sapphire graphics cards we have reviewed. It retains its internal Crossfire connector so two dual-GPU cards can be connected together, although no ATI driver currently allows this.

Sapphire hinted that it could form the world's first quad-crossfire graphics set up, competing with Nvidia's quad-SLI we've previously reviewed.

Each GPU has access to 512MB of GDDR3 Ram, resulting in 1GB overall. Both cores operate at 580MHz and the memory operates at 1400MHz, identical to single-GPU X1950 Pro cards.

Finally Sapphire has also added a silent X1650 Pro based graphics card called the x1650 Pro Ultimate to its line up.

The card is very similar to Gigabyte's silent X1650 Pro card that has been on the market for some months. It features a heatpipe based cooler and large 8mm thick heatsink.

It comes equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and clock speeds of 600MHz for the core and 1400MHz for the memory. Prices for both cards have yet to be announced.