Sure, times might be tough at AMD, but that's not stopping the crew at ATI from gunning for NVIDIA's newest gear -- the company just announced the new HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2. Aimed at the "super high-end" of the market, the $399 4850 X2 and $599 4870 X2 feature two GPU chips on a 625 or 750MHz bus, respectively, with up to 2GB of 900MHz GDDR5 RAM. ATI says that there's a 20 percent overhead from pairing up the processors, so the X2s should offer 180 percent of the single GPU cards -- certainly enough to outgun a single NVIDIA GTX 280, and reportedly enough to match a dual-280 setup depending on the game. We'll see for sure when the inevitable flood of benchmarks hits when these bad boys arrive next month -- any gamers out there going to take the plunge?

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AMD is apparently getting ready to launch its new Phenom processor on November 19th, according to DailyTech. The chipmaker's media guide for the launch seems to have been leaked early, and it's got some interesting info in it regarding the Phenom and the next-gen Radeon. We already knew most of the Phenom deets, but it looks like the supporting RD790 chipset is also ready to go, along with three versions of the RV670 Radeon HD 3800 series. The low-end 3850 is actually a revised version of the existing Radeon HD 2900 with a die shrink from 80nm to 55nm, but the top-end Radeon HD 3870 is a new design with a 100MHz clock bump to 775MHz. All the cards feature support for Quad Crossfire and AMD's Triple Play Physics system, but don't feature any of the hardware video decoders that had been rumored. Unless something changes, we should be seeing all this stuff on the 19th -- which is probably when we'll know about pricing as well.

Gecube's Gemini 3 is the only solution on the market right now if you need a crossfire ATI card setup, but your motherboard only has one 16x PCI-e slot. The Gemini 3 is two Radeon HD 2600 XT GPUs on one card, featuring four DVI ports -- yes, you can hook up four monitors to a single card. The performance isn't exactly highest end, but the card certainly held its own in the testing that the Tweaktown guys put it through. It also happens to draw a relatively small amount of power, and keeps cool thanks to its massive dual slot heatsink and fan. Unfortunately, we've got no idea when or for how much you can get your hands on this little powerhouse.

AMD is losing the "X" prefix of its ATI graphics lineup, and slapping on "HD" to denote the changes and advancements in its R600-based DirectX 10 cards. Up top is the Radeon HD 2900 XT (the rumors were close), with 320 stream processors, double that of the GeForce 8800 GTX from NVIDIA. The lower-end RV630- and RV610-based cards will go as the HD 2600 Pro / XT and the HD 2400 Pro / XT. HD on all these cards denotes the Avivo HD technology on board for decoding H.264 and VC-1 video off of Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. The 2900 series also has full HDMI outs, with integrated 5.1 surround sound. No exact launch date or pricing yet, but we shouldn't have too much longer to wait.