The Sapphire brand name seems to dominate the market with their ATI based graphics cards. They are always quick to market with the latest models, many of their products feature enhancements that exceed the performance of reference deigns, and according to their website they are ATI's largest and best performing partner. We guess those three things could be closely related to dominating the market. The product provided is a perfect example of Sapphire's approach. The Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 512MB graphics card finds the newly released Radeon HD 4850 on a custom PCB, coupled with a high performance Zalman cooler, factory overclocked and offers optimized performance. - BigBruin

Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 512MB Edition Board Review

When you see that something from Sapphire is Toxic, don't be afraid. All this means is that the graphics card has been factory overclocked for even greater performance. And a reference design Radeon HD 4850 has the GPU running at 625MHz and the memory running at 1986MHz. What we have here is an instant boost on the core clock and memory. While the specifications indicate memory running at 2200MHz, the sample provided for this article arrived with the memory set to 2300MHz. This is a lot faster than the reference design, and since it came this way, it was tested this way to mark its gaming performance.

The Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 is sold in the rather compact, black box. The front and back panels provide information regarding what the card is capable of and what is included in the bundle, and the graphics does remind us of the T-1000 character from the terminator. Every Sapphire card we have seen so far has been sealed in a padded anti-static bag with a big stop sign printed on it to remind you to connect the PCI Express power cables to the card prior to use. This model takes things one step further with a second label, and we honestly hope people weren't somehow missing the first one as it is a suite important one.

The card sports a blue PCB like many others from Sapphire, but in lieu of a more traditional single slot blower style cooler, this one is matched up with an aftermarket cooler from Zalman. And Zalman makes some incredible cooling products, and the Toxic HD 4850 gets a nice heatpipe cooler, as well as a set of matching heatsinks to cover every memory chip. The front of the card seems to have a good deal of open real estate, which we guess would generally be concealed by a more traditional single slot cooler. The back of the card shows nothing as interesting features, the two tabs for CrossFireX are also visible.

The Radeon HD 4850 chipset was launched to fill a role in the middle of the graphics card market. The Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 512MB graphics card stands out in this crowd of average cards by offering a factory overclocked GPU and memory, as well as a cooling upgrade that keeps it cool and quiet. The results showed that the performance is solid, and that any game should be enjoyable on the Toxic HD 4850. It wasn't the best performing card, but it did very well while costing less than some of the other units on hand. And that is an important factor to take away and to keep in mind when interested to buy one.

On the downside, the main technical concerns are that the thermal sensor was disabled, and that the memory was actually overclocked higher than specified. The casual user may not ever notice either issue, and since the memory was stable at 2300MHz we left it there. Keeping an eye on temperatures is generally a good idea with the hot chips on the market today, but the Zalman cooler kept things down low enough that this is also now a non-issue. Our only other issue was that the Zalman cooler and memory heatsink installation looked like something done at home, and not what we would expect from a factory setup.

Newegg carries this card for $200, but currently offers a rebate that brings the final price down to $180. A reference design Radeon HD 4850 will generally cost about $170, so you aren't paying all that much extra for the cooling upgrade and factory overclock. The bundle of accessories adds value to the card if you are interested in multimedia use of the card, or trying out 3DMark Vantage, but we think a popular game title might make the bundle even more appealing. If you want a great card, but do not have to have the best, this is definitely one to put on your list, especially if noise is an issue for you.