ATI officially launched the 4850 X2 alongside the 4870 X2 way back in August, but here we are in mid-October and the card is still MIA. There are signs that the card will be hitting the market shortly however. From Xbit Labs:

ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 graphics card, which was formally announced back in August and is still yet unavailable, will finally reach stores in the coming weeks, according to ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 graphics cards that feature two ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics chips along with 2GB of GDDR3 memory (1GB per chip) are 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.

I spoke with ATI about this yesterday and they explained that their board partners have chosen to focus on the 4870 X2 rather than the 4850 X2. Since they won't be providing a 4850 X2 card directly, they're entirely reliant on their board partners to distribute cards. As Xbit mentions, ATI is now pushing their board partners to ship 4850 X2 cards with 2GB of memory (1GB per GPU); back in August most of the board partners we spoke with were leaning towards going with just 1GB of RAM.

The cards are indeed in the process of getting certified, although right now it looks like Sapphire is going to be first out of the gate with cards at the retail level. This shouldn't be much of a surprise considering that Sapphire is currently handling all 4870 X2 card production for ATI and their board partners.

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