Gainward, currently a division of Palit Microsystems, used to be an exclusive partner of Nvidia’s and offered products with Nvidia’s GPUs only. But the triumphant step of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 could not go unnoticed and somewhere in the middle of the previous year Palit gave up its exclusive friendship with Nvidia in favor of ATI’s solutions, especially as ATI allows more freedom to its partners when it comes to developing nonstandard PCBs and coolers. As the result, there are more unique products for the customer to choose from, which is good for everyone.

But how can a potential customer be attracted to an RV770-based graphics card? The manufacturers solve this problem in different ways. For example, Sapphire offered an advanced dual-processor card capable of competing Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280/285 but not as expensive as the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. It is called Sapphire HD 4850 X2 2G/1G GDDR3. The company endowed this device with a number of unique features (particularly it can support four monitors simultaneously), but our test revealed some drawbacks, the most important of which was the terrifically high level of noise. So, notwithstanding its high performance in games, that card was hardly any more appealing than the low-noise GeForce GTX 280/285. The developer should be given credit for correcting the problem quickly, though: the new version of the Sapphire HD 4850 X2 2G/1G GDDR3 is far less noisy.

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