Following last month’s comparison of ATi and Nvidia’s competing graphics technologies, Sapphire has had time to work with the 4850 card, manipulating and modifying it to create a premium offering, labeled “toxic”.

Built around the 55nm RV770 PRO core, the Toxic has 256MB of GDDR3 memory connected through a 256-bit memory bus. With the same number of shader units as the 4870, the only remaining differences are the clock speed and memory type. Sapphire has attempted to cancel out this difference through a factory-applied overclock, raising the core speed by 50MHz and the memory by a massive 350MHz, made possible by the addition of an aftermarket cooler. Manufactured by Zalman, the series of copper fins are soldered to two heatpipes with a large fan in the middle.

The layout of the card is modified as well, with the memory chips moved closer to the core to take advantage of the airflow provided by the cooler. This causes the card to appear sparse on the front, but the rear side is adorned with hundreds of resistors and circuit traces. The physical size of the card will be compatible with most cases, though the PCI-Express power socket faces away from the card, meaning the power cable requires an extra few centimeters.
Call of Duty 4 was first up in our performance tests, and on medium settings we recorded an amazing 86 frames per second. Bumping the settings up to high netted an exceptional result of 61 frames per second.

Our second test was the latest patched version of Crysis. At the game’s demanding medium settings, the Toxic was able to provide 54 frames per second, which is more than enough to give any gamer a good experience. Moving up in the detail stakes to high produced 32 frames per second, which is playable, if not ideal for smooth gameplay. The bottom line is that there’s very little on the market that the Toxic won’t be able to handle.

The Sapphire 4850 Toxic provides solid performance, and even the capacity to be overclocked further thanks to the custom cooling. While you won’t be able to run every game at its highest settings, the majority will run beautifully. Its performance and features make it easy to recommend, whether you’re looking to upgrade, or simply looking for a great new card.