In a time where AMD/ATI is starving the whole ATI Radeon ecosystem by the lack of new products, Sapphire is the only company who did the right thing and started thinking outside the box to develop a new competitive product based on what's available today.
When I first heard about the X1950 Pro Dual I expected it to be a PR stunt to draw some attention to the X1950 Pro line of products. But after testing the final board I am surprised by how well it works. The single fan is running at acceptable levels, yet the board never gets extremely hot. Of course two GPUs require their power, but with power draw numbers similar to a single X1900 XTX, the results are not too bad.
In our testing the Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual can deliver excellent performance, but not beat the GeForce 8800 GTX, which is much more expensive. Ironically Sapphire's biggest obstacle in selling the X1950 Pro Dual will be the R600 cards coming out next month. Everybody will wait and see what AMD will deliver and then decide which product to buy.
The possibility to run Quad CrossFire in the future may sound interesting, but I suggest everybody waits until a driver is available and then evaluates the possible gains. A nice addition for a completely different market segment would be if Sapphire added a PCI slot bracket with the two additional DVI outputs that should be available on the board. This would allow a high performance 3D rig with four or eight outputs without going into niche market video card solutions.
Update: Sapphire informed me that they will sell their card for $349 now instead of $399.