AMD has been bleeding money badly for some time now and things are starting to reach a critical point. However there is some light at the end of the tunnel thanks to their newly released Radeon HD 4000 series, which has Nvidia in all sorts of trouble. In fact just recently we got word that Nvidia is once again slashing prices of their latest GeForce GTX series in an effort to try and become more competitive.

This really is an unpredictable situation that Nvidia has found themselves in, having just released the most powerful, most complex and most technologically advanced graphics card to date. While Nvidia were working overtime counting transistors, AMD were getting back to basics, by producing products that we could all afford. Products like the Radeon HD 4850 which offers performance at a $200 US price tag, which was previously only had when spending over $300 US.

In fact the Radeon HD 4850 is so cheap that we have been tempted to set up a number of Crossfire systems. Past generation Radeon and GeForce graphics cards in my opinion, have left Crossfire and SLI support to the high-end cards. For example, there was no point buying two GeForce 9600 GT graphics cards to use in SLI mode, as it would make more sense to simply purchase a single 9800 GTX graphics card. Although the 9600 GT was an exceptionally good value product, sticking two of them together just didn’t work.

However the Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards are so fast that pairing two of them together does produce some very impressive results. For example, a pair of Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards in Crossfire mode are not much slower than a GeForce GTX 280 when testing with Crysis, while we found them to be much faster in other games such as Enemy Territory Quake Wars. Purchasing two Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards will set you back roughly $400 US, while a single GeForce GTX 280 costs $650 US, and even with upcoming price cuts reducing it to $500 US, it’s still significantly more expensive.

Furthermore, we believe many gamers will also look to place a pair of Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards in Crossfire mode for ultimate performance. The only question remains, what chipset will you require to unleash the full potential of your Radeon HD 4000 series Crossfire configuration? It is well known that the Intel P35 chipset was pretty useless when it came to Crossfire performance, due to its PCIe 1.0 16x/4x card configuration. The new P45 chipset uses PCI Express 2.0 for twice the bandwidth and in Crossfire mode will run the cards in an even 8x/8x configuration.

All up we will be testing the Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards in Crossfire using the P35, X38, P45 and X48 chipsets, while the P35 and P45 chipsets will both be tested in 16x/4x and 8x/8x configurations. So without wasting any more time, let’s find out what’s what shall we…