The Toxic HD 4870 is the name for Sapphire's special version of their Radeon HD 4870, this time with some special cooling and an overclocked core. The board uses their Vapor-X cooling that does a great job at 780MHz core speeds and 4000MHz effectively memory speed. Today's card comes with 512MB of GDDR5 memory, but as of January this year, the same video card is available with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Additional memory pays off at high resolutions and in texture intensive games, which are growing in numbers buy the way. And to make things even more interesting, we are soon expecting Sapphire to announce its Radeon HD 4870 with even 2GB of GDDR5 memory being available. - FudZilla

Sapphire Toxic HD 4870 Vapor-X Edition Card Review

The Toxic HD 4870 looks quite nice with black cooling and a large fan. The fan blows the air out of the case and it uses three heatpipes to maximize cooling efficiency. We are no strangers to the Vapor-X cooling, and cooling the 55nm based RV770 chipset as well as the rest of the card won't be a problem whatsoever. The Vapor-X uses vapor chamber technology, and it has proven its worth on Sapphire's cards using it up to date. However, unlike the old cooler, the new one uses three heatpipes to improve cooling even further. The Vapor-X operation is similar to classic heatpipe technology, though slightly advanced.

In the process of cooling, the water turns to steam, which fills up the vacuum chamber. The air pressure within the chamber is extremely low which enables for quick water vaporization. The GPU touches the vacuum chamber directly, and it acts as the heat source which heats up the vaporization wick. And the resulting steam moves freely in all directions, towards the cooler part of the chamber and through the heatpipes, where upon touching the cold walls turns to water again. Condensation module gathers water and the transportation module brings it back to start the process over again. Simple though effective cooling process.

Sapphire overclocked its Toxic board from reference 750MHz to 780MHz and the memory by 400MHz from reference 3600MHz. The performance scaled well with overclocking, as gaming also reported a similar performance increase. Now only some RV770 graphics chips will run over 850MHz, and we were quite happy with our Sapphire Toxic HD 4870 as we pushed it to 860MHz with no troubles. The memory allowed for additional 600MHz and we ended up at 4600MHz effectively. During our quite long gaming tests we've noticed artifacts only once, but we'd still not recommend such high clocks and opt for lower settings for your overclocking.

The Sapphire Toxic HD 4870 card features a non reference dual slot cooling and higher core and memory clocks. The cooling based on vapor chamber technology ensures that the 780MHz core stays up to 28°C cooler than reference 750MHz core. We're looking at a 30MHz factory overclock as well as a 400MHz memory overclock up to 4000MHz effectively. Their Radeon HD 4870 is a great gaming card, and Sapphire surely brings it to the next level. Compared to the reference 512MB card, Sapphire's card brings better results and you can increase it further with about ten percent if you do some manual overclocking.

The Toxic HD 4870 features 512MB of GDDR5 memory and that will be enough unless you like them high resolutions and filters on. In that case, you'd be better off buying a 1GB memory card, or even wait for Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 2GB version. Higher clocks and Toxic Vapor-X cooling do however come at a price and you'll have to pay around $25 more compared to the reference card's price. If you want a fast Radeon HD 4870 with some powerful cooling, then this graphics card just might strike your chord.