Sapphire's Toxic branding means factory overclocks, custom cooling and win. And Toxic is exactly what Radeon HD 4850 needed. Despite outstanding, downright cheap gaming performance, there were still some subtle drawbacks to the Radeon HD 4850's 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 Radeon HD 4850 is a great card that pretty much everyone agrees on, it's also mundane. Which is part of why Toxic is so popular and not just hardware. - TechLounge

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Toxic Style Review

Sapphire piles on the accessories and software with this card, making certain that it's at the top of everyone's Radeon HD 4850 list. It's fast and has a Zalman heatsink bolted on at the factory. And it will give any Radeon HD 4870 some serious competition. 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 4-phase for the GPU power.

There are two CrossFire tabs at the top for CrossFire and CrossFireX, and the 6-pin power connection faces the front of the card. Like any good Radeon HD 4850, the component side of the PCB is showered in electronics, but the face is very clean. Overclocking in the Catalyst control center went by quickly. It got to the utility's ceiling of 700/2400MHz in about five minutes. We have no doubts that the card can surpass that with other overclocking utilities. So that's awesome, by the way. Given that at stock, a Radeon HD 4850 can continue to overclock, we'd feel safe assuming that overclocking and increasing the fan's speed mutually.

This is the ATI counter point to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, the Sapphire's Toxic HD 4850. It may be alone, and it may not be more power friendly, but it's wickedly fast. The icing is that it doesn't really cost more than other Radeon HD 4850's. Sure it's on the high side, but it's still cheaper than a Radeon HD 4850 and a Zalman heatsink. The astounding thing is how closely the Toxic keeps up with a Radeon HD 4870, cards that cost close to a hundred dollars more. Any Toxic can max out Catalyst's control center overclocking, and it most definitely runs at higher voltages which does have a very positive effect on the performance.

It uses about thirty percent more electricity than a stock Radeon HD 4850, and that's more than just higher clocks. So it's got a lot of overclocking headroom, or if you want to tweak in the other direction, you can slow down the fan for dual slot silence. Like we said, we bet you can do both. Seeing how easily it is to come across CrossFire capable motherboards, whether you want one or two, this is the $200 video card. With its complete bundle and features, it doesn't really have competition.