Los Angeles (CA) - Just like we previously announced, leading AMD partners are rolling out custom designs of the new ATI Radeon 4800 series video cards.  Two companies, Sapphire and PowerColor, are cramming 2 GB of video memory onto their cards and adding in overclocking features.

Sapphire is preparing its Radeon 4850 1GB on a blue PCB, with higher clock speeds than reference products. On the other hand, PowerColor is bringing a Radeon 4850 not just with 1GB, but also with massive 2GB of GDDR3 memory.

PowerColor's 4850 PCS 2GB is the first consumer card with 2GB of memory, which is a nice PR coup. However, the company’s press release claims that this was the first ever with 2GB of memory. Sorry guys, first one was ATI's FireGL V8650, professional card based on the Radeon 2900XT.

But the really impressive product is the PowerColor Radeon 4870 PCS 1GB. Based on "Super RV770" concept, PowerColor put 1GB of GDDR5 memory and overclocked the GPU to 800 MHz. The company is still fine tuning the memory, but we received word that targeted memory clocks could be higher than what we expect. PCS stands for "Professional Cooling System" or a fancy name for Zerotherm's VGA coolers. In any case, these coolers will no doubt work better than reference ones.

According to current schedule, partners should receive their GPUs for mass-production during last week of July, so you should see these cards in first or second week of August.

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