We last took a look at Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 Toxic graphics part back in October, thanks to its 512MB variant, and overall we were really rather impressed with it. Between its clock speed boosts which added a little sheen to the board's performance levels and an excellent, quiet vapour chamber technology powered cooler, it proved itself to be one of our favourite Radeon HD 4870 solutions. Now the Radeon HD 4870 Toxic makes its return, this time offering the same cooling solution and factory overclocks, but throwing a 1GB frame buffer onto the board to give some extra impetus to the card when it comes to high resolution gaming. Can Sapphire repeat the success of their 512MB Toxic part? - Elite Bastards

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic Version Review

As per Sapphire's 512MB Toxic variant, they have chosen to up both core and memory clocks to the same degree on the Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic edition. The board's RV770 core gets a very modest rise of just 30MHz to leave us with a core clock speed of 780MHz only, while the board's GDDR5 memory gets more attention lavished upon it, increasing the clock speed from 3600MHz to 4000MHz effectively. Once again, this Radeon HD 4870 Toxic offering rolls out Sapphire's dual slot, vapour chamber cooling technology, coupled with three heatpipes to handle the heat from both the core and memory, while hot air is exhausted.

With factory overclocks already provided by Sapphire on the Toxic edition, is there much room for further clock speed increases? Using the Catalyst built-in overclocking tools, let's see how much more we can squeeze out of it. Sapphire's offering hit a stable core clock of 810MHz to give us an extra 30MHz boost. Our sample's GDDR5 memory fared even better and reached 4260MHz effective. Not vast increases in clock speed though, granted but not too shabby either. While Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 Toxic has proved to be the warmest RV770 based solution, when it comes to looking at noise generated it's also the quietest.

Overall, there isn't a really a great deal that we can say about the 1GB variant of Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 Toxic that we didn't already cover before with the 512MB model. From a performance standpoint it simply adds a little extra gloss to the Radeon HD 4870's already excellent performance, much in line with the HIS part we looked at before Christmas, and that gloss helps it to hold its own against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 in pure frame rate terms even in places where a reference board may slip behind slightly. And our particular Toxic sample also impressed a little more with regard to the additional overclocking.

Aside from pure performance, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Toxic edition also looks to stand out from the crowd in terms of its cooling solution. While some of its rival boards do a better job of keeping temperatures much lower, Sapphire have clearly built the Toxic with noise levels in mind, keeping temperatures well within acceptable levels but as quietly as possible. If you choose to go with the Radeon HD 4870 1GB however, and are looking for something a little bit beyond its reference specifications, then the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Toxic offers a compelling blend of improved performance and a well designed, quiet cooling.