Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Toxic 512MB

Examination:

The biggest physical change with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Toxic is its cooling solution. Rather than going with the single-slot reference cooler, Sapphire has partnered with Zalman and they have used the VF900 heatsink. Over the Radeon HD 4850 reference heatsink, the Zalman VF900 heatsink cooler should offer improved cooling performance and a lower noise level. The Zalman VF900 is a pure copper heatsink and fins that uses dual heatpipes for driving heat away from the RV770 graphics processor. The noise level for the Zalman VF900 fan is between 18.5 to 25 dBA.

This Toxic graphics card comes with a 50MHz factory overclock over the Radeon HD 4850, which puts the core frequency at 675MHz. The GDDR3 video memory isn't cooled by the VF900 directly, but there are RAM heatsinks on all of the memory ICs. Samsung manufactures the GDDR3 memory. The memory frequency has seen a modest boost as well with it operating at 1100MHz compared to the 993MHz reference clock. On top of that, the Samsung memory is designed to operate at 1200MHz so there is a bit of additional overclocking room.

Aside from the cooling solution, the other noticeable change with the Sapphire Toxic graphics card is the blue PCB while the reference models are red. Towards the rear of the graphics card is another heatsink that covers some of the power circuitry for this graphics card. The Radeon HD 4850 series requires a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector.