At CES in Las Vegas, which took place last January, Sapphire was showing a Radeon X1950 card which had two GPUs on one PCB. Two months later at CeBIT, Sapphire showed us two of these cards connected to each other through Crossfire, successfully creating a Quad-Crossfire system.

The two cards are quite large, in terms of both length and height. If they will ever actually be sold by Sapphire, they will definitely require a large case to actually hold them, unless of course you don’t use a case at all. The cards each have two Crossfire connectors, similar to what is used on the Radeon X1950Pro and Radeon X1650XT.

Each card needs two PCIe 6-pin connectors, therefore making them in a way similar to the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX GPUs. Looking at the cards from the back, we can see that each separate GPU on the card is located at a different level to help accommodate the memory chips. The technical characteristics of the two GPUs on the boards are identical to those of the Radeon X1950PRO.

Sapphire was running 3D Mark 2006 on the Quad-Radeon system in loop. Performance, though, was not being displayed during the tests. They also failed to run any other 3D tests. The use of Quad Radeon X1950PROs probably has many conflicts with the current set of ATI drivers, so it is not very hard to imagine why Sapphire isn’t able to run many 3D applications on the Quad-GPU system. Quad-Crossfire technology will probably not make it to the market implemented on Radeon X1950PROs. Keeping in mind that the release of AMD’s DirectX 10 cards is right around the corner, it is much more likely that we will see the technology adopted for use with the new upper end DirectX 10 cards.