Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Toxic 512MB

Back in June we were first to deliver Radeon HD 4850 benchmarks on Linux just after the new high-end ATI/AMD GPUs were launched. We were also successful in using the Radeon HD 4850 with an open-source driver and had exclusively shared that CrossFire support is coming to Linux along with a horde of other improvements. These new Linux features are coming soon, but today we are looking at a new Radeon HD 4850 graphics card from Sapphire Technology. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Toxic 512MB ships with a performance-oriented Zalman cooler and it also comes factory overclocked.

Features:

- GDDR3 memory 256-bit memory interface
- DirectX 10.1
- ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
- Dynamic geometry acceleration
- Game physics processing capability
- ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
- Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD)
- ATI PowerPlay technology
- 55nm Manufacturing

Contents:

The Sapphire packaging for the HD 4850 Toxic is black and the graphics on the packaging are targeted at enthusiasts and gamers as is the product itself. A few of the items printed on this packaging are the HDMI support, 512MB GDDR3 memory, Zalman VF900 heatsink, PCI-E 2.0, Ruby ROM Inside, and some of the third-party software that ships with this graphics card. Inside there were two thick layers of foam protecting the graphics card along with the ESD bubble wrap.

Accompanying the Radeon HD 4850 graphics card was a 4-pin molex to 6-pin PCI Express power adapter, one CrossFire bridge, S-Vide to analog video adapter, video output adapter, one DVI to VGA adapter, one DVI to HDMI adapter, Sapphire graphics card user manual, CyberLink PowerDVD, FutureMark 3DMark Vantage, Ruby ROM Volume II, and the Sapphire driver CD. Ruby ROM contains a variety of Windows-based games and other demos. The Sapphire driver CD only contains the ATI Catalyst drivers for Microsoft Windows and XP, but not the Catalyst x86/x86_64 Linux driver. These accessories are what most expect from a graphics card, but sadly, for most Linux users the PowerDVD and 3DMark Vantage copies will go to waste.