Just the other day, we went to a friend's house to fix one of his computers having a problem with the video card crashing for no specific reason. The first thing we noticed as we walked into the computer room was how much warmer it was than the rest of the house. After commenting on that and shutting off his media player we heard a high pitched whining sound coming from his case. We asked what it was and it was to keep the ZEROtherm graphics cooler at 100% or the graphics card would freeze. Right there we knew that heat was his issue and immediately went to check his heatsink for dust build up and to make sure that it had some decent heatsink paste, and be able to handle these conditions. - HiTechLegion

Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic Card Design Preview

We live in Florida and heat is an issue, if we just cool our houses too much our electric bills are extremely high, so we choose to find a logical median where it may be comfortable or electronics suffer. But cooling then becomes one of the most important issues when we want to protect our computer components. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic is pre-overclocked which comes with Sapphire's Vapor-X cooling solution. This Radeon HD 4890 Toxic is built around the RV790 graphics processor which is a 55nm chipset having 800 streaming processors. Though this is just one version using the vapor chamber technology.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic edition comes packaged in a bright black box which caught our eye immediately due to the image of the mascot at the center of the box. The back of the box lists some of the new features offered with the video card. The board itself is placed in an antistatic bag and when removed from it, you will get your first look at their heatsink which is a dual slot cooling solution. And the heatsink on the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic shows the Sapphire and Toxic logos as well as the Vapor-X's which is Sapphire's premier cooling solution. The board itself is made of sapphire blue PCB.

If you are looking to upgrade your system or just your video card and desire the coolest quiet pre-overclocked performance a graphics card can give straight out of the box, do not overlook the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic version. With the Vapor-X cooling system this is one of the most quiet and efficient air cooling systems on the market. We were a little shocked that we took a performance hit when we overclocked the board, we first thought it was a heat issue but that wasn't the case. The dip in performance wasn't much but when you overclock you do expect some type of an increase really, don't you?

We do also need to remember one thing, if you purchase a pre-overclocked card it is usually overclocked to the maximum that such specific GPU can handle and pushing it further can result in a performance loss. So why do we try to overclock an overclocked card anyway? Overall our suggestion would be if you choose a Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic choose it for the superior cooling you'll get with the Vapor-X solution, for clock speeds and price that trump most pre-overclocked versions straight out of the box.