Sapphire’s Toxic branding means factory overclocks, custom cooling, and win. And Toxic is exactly what HD 4850 needed. Despite outstanding, downright cheap gaming performance, there were still some subtle drawbacks to the 4850s out there. Semi-drawback: they were all the same.
People who build their own computers want them to be unique. The aftermarket thrives on tweakers’ desire to have the most unique machine, something that reflects the effort that’s gone into putting together a PC from scratch. Because the 4850 is a great card that pretty much everyone agrees on, it’s also mundane. Which is part of why Toxic is so popular–it’s different, and because Sapphire pulls out stops to make sure that it’s not just hardware.
Sapphire piles on the accessories and software with this card, making certain that it’s at the top of everyone’s 4850 list. It’s fast and has a Zalman heatsink bolted on at the factory. And it’ll give any HD 4870 some serious competition.
First Impressions
The card’s PCB is Sapphire Blue, with the bright copper heatsink, both stand out. The fan is azure-tinged, too, but not LED-lit. It’s got a little holographic logo on the fan’s spindle to let you know it’s a Sapphire card, in case you forget. The power regulation hardware gets its own heatsink, aluminum with a blue patina. It’s a theme. It appears to be a four-phase process for the GPU and a two-phase process for the memory.
With the manual, CrossFire bridge, power adapter, component breakout adapter, a composite adapter, VGA adapter, and HDMI adapter, Sapphire includes Cyberlink’s DVD Suite, PowerDVD 7, 3DMark Vantage, and Sapphire’s own Ruby ROM–a collection of utilities and demos. And of course, a driver CD.
There are two CF tabs at the top for CrossFire and CFX, and the 6-pin power connection faces the front of the card. Like any good 4850, the component side of the PCB is showered in electronics, but the face is very clean. Just aluminum capacitors and heatsinks–each memory IC gets its own, too.
Specifications
- Brand: SAPPHIRE
- Model:100242TXSR
- Interface: PCI Express 2.0 x16
- Chipset Manufacturer: ATI
- GPU: Radeon HD 4850
- Core clock: 675MHz
- Stream Processors: 800 Stream Processing Units
- Memory Clock: 2200MHz
- Memory Size: 512MB
- Memory Interface: 256-bit
- Memory Type: GDDR3
- DirectX: DirectX 10.1
- OpenGL: OpenGL 2.1
- HDMI: 1 via Adapter
- DVI: 2
- TV-Out: HDTV / S-Video Out
- RAMDAC: 400 MHz
- Max Resolution: 2560 x 1600
- CrossFire Supported: Yes
- Cooler: With Fan
- Power Connector: 6 Pin
- Dual-Link DVI Supported: Yes
- HDCP Ready: Yes
- Features: OC edition w/ Zalman’s VF90 cooling
Package Contents:
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Toxic Video Card, Driver Disk
- User’s Manual
- HDTV Cable
- Power Cable
- DVI to VGA/D-sub Adapter
- DVI to HDMI Adapter
- CrossFire Bridge
- S-Video to Composite Adapter
Test Setup
- In this review, we’ll be comparing the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB TOXIC to:
- EVGA GeForce GTX 260 896MB FTW
- Palit HD 4870 512MB
- PNY GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB
- PowerColor HD 4850 512MB
