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Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Toxic Video Card
Introduction
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 four-phase for the GPU and two-phase 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 All cards were benched on the same test computer with recent drivers (April or newer).  Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz Asus Rampage Formula 2GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 800 @ 4-4-4-12 (Sponsored by Crucial) Thermaltake Toughpower 1000 (Sponsored by Thermaltake) Windows Vista Ultimate x64 (Sponsored by Microsoft)
Page 1: Introduction, First Impressions, Specifications & Test Setup
Page 2: DirectX 10 Titles Page 3: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 4: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 5: Conclusion 
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Add Comment
1 User Comment 1 - Posted by
Cessus
on September 16, 2008 - 2:05 pm got one of theses and its almost as fast as my 9800gtx+ i love it
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