According to the website Fudzilla, ATI has been holding back the floodgates of non-standard HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards in order to make sure all the reference boards clear out the warehouse first.

So far, not many non-stock and standard HD 4850s and HD 4870s have come out, but there have been a few exceptions. MSI released a HD 4870 with a mild, 30 MHz overclock, and as he talked about yesterday, Diamond is releasing a Black Edition O/C card. It also seems that Sapphire will be coming out with a HD 4850 with 1GB of GDDR3 -- this is probably going to be a popular configuration, and will probably be copied by a few other partners.

As you may have heard, the HD 4870 X2 (RV700) should be coming out within a few weeks. Supposedly the dual-GPU on one PCB HD4870X2 is about 10% faster than two separate HD4870's working in a CrossFire setup, thanks mostly in part to a whopping 2 GB's of GDDR5 memory. Of course, if it comes out, we'll review.

A little bit further into August, we can expect more unique offerings to be brought to market by ATI's board partners. Similar to the HD 3000 series, ATI will be allowing a lot of leeway with designs. One possible product might be a HD 4850 X2 card -- last generation, Asus was the only company to try its hand at the the HD3850X2, and this card was surprisingly nice. A HD4850X2 would fit well in the current line-up between a HD4870 and a HD4870X2, so with this generation doing so well for ATI, it seems likely that it'll be made, to give consumers an oppourtinity to buy a HD48xx card at whatever price-point they're interested in, be it $200, $300, $400, or anywhere in between.

Last time around Unika (a far Eastern card maker) put out a HD 3850 with GDDR4,so it seems likely that another possible upcoming design could be a HD 4850 with 512MB or 1GB of GDDR5.

On the NVIDIA side of things, you can certainly expect partners such as XFX, BFG and EVGA to offer extremely overclocked products, in order to compete with ATI's momentary upper-hand. EVGA has already unleashed a flurry of SSC and FTW branded cards, and water-cooled GTX 260 and 280 cards willl likely crop up from a few board partners as well (BFG springs to mine). Much further down the road (say a few months) a super-charged dual-GPU GTX 280 could become a possibility, but this is probably not likely due to the prohibitive cost of such a venture. However a sort of GTX 280 Ultra product (a GTX 280 [290?] with significantly quickened shader cores) seems more likely -- but this is just conjecture at this point.