Sapphire's HD 4850 TOXIC Finally Lands

We had to wait quite some time before we finally got to see the latest Sapphire graphics card, but chances are it may have all been worth it. Of course, we are talking about the highly anticipated HD 4850 TOXIC Edition, a card that has been so hyped that it should practically sell the moment it hits the store shelves. Or, at least, this is what Sapphire is hoping as far as its latest product is concerned.

As expected, the new Sapphire graphics card has been designed on the mid-range Radeon HD 4850 GPU. The same GPU also powers another of Sapphire's cards, one that, unlike similar products available on the market from the competition, packs no less than 1GB of GDDR3 memory. Nevertheless, this is not the case with the latest TOXIC card, which has been built to enhance the graphics power of the mid range HD 4850 GPU.

This means that the card will be made available factory-overclocked and will come with a custom cooling solution. Another thing that Sapphire has done with its TOXIC card is to have raised the GPU core to 675MHz, while in the memory department the performance was pushed up to 1100MHz. Other than that, the card provides everything you might expect from a HD 4000-series card, that is, support for DirectX 10.1, PCI Express 2.0 and ATI's Avivo HD Technology.

One of the most significant features of the TOXIC is its cooling solution, which has been provided by one of the leading manufacturers of cooling products, Zalman. The heatpipe fan is said to enable more efficient cooling, as it is capable of efficiently dissipating the heat from the overclocked GPU.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, we can't specify for how much the new card will sell, but all details on pricing should be revealed soon enough, as the TOXIC is shipped to various retailers. As a side note, you will be able to recognize the card almost at first glance because of its completely black packing.