Back in August it was reported that ATI were expected to release the 4850X2 “shortly”...

Now finally ATI has said that the 4850 X2 should hit the shelves of your favourite component supplier within weeks. The 4850X2 is the smaller cousin of the 4870X2 and like its bigger sibling will feature 2 4850 chips on a single PCB, with each core having access to 1GB of GDDR3 memory.

4850X2 designs have now “validated” by graphics cards makers, said Sasha Marinkovic, senior product marketing manager at AMD’s graphics products group at a news-conference on Thursday. The new 4850X2 is expected to retail in the region of $350-$399 according to ATI.

It is expected to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s monolithic single core design Gefore GTX 280 which currently retails in the $499 price range.

It’s predicted that the 4850X2 will match and in many cases surpass its Nvidia counterpart. But fundamentally it’s still suffers from the problem of all dual-chip designs; driver profiles are needed to be able to use both cores in games. If the game is not supported then the 4850X2 will only use a single core [via neowin]