Sapphire's Toxic HD 4850 to Arrive Soon

These past few days, graphics card maker Sapphire has been showered with quite some attention from the online media, and that happened especially ever since AMD unleashed the new RV770-based graphics card lineup. But Sapphire is also expected to release a card based on AMD's mid-range HD 4850 GPU, which is said to provide a whole new Radeon performance level, when compared with other HD 4850-based cards.

Bearing a name that can't be easily forgotten or overlooked, Toxic, this product is probably one of the most highly anticipated graphics cards this summer. Many are the things have been said and written about it, but nothing is yet certain and details are still scarce, so there's not much to go on. Even so, the card is now slated for release sooner than previously expected. So, soon enough, we should see what Sapphire has managed to do with AMD's HD 4850 and how much we're to pay for the new card.

The news comes after Sapphire has just recently launched a 1GB version of the above-mentioned GPU. This card was built using Sapphire's own PCB, a feature that the Toxic version is also expected to incorporate. Unfortunately, the 1GB of graphics memory has taken a toll on the card's overall price tag, which ends up by being $50 more expensive than the 512MB version. A higher pricing is also to be expected with the Toxic card but, then again, higher performance almost always also translates into a price tag above certain limits.

Sapphire's Toxic version of the HD 4850 GPU should come with 512MB of GDDR3 memory factory overclocked. The card's core is also expected to run higher clock speeds than the reference model. Nevertheless, these are the only details currently available, since no exact numbers have surfaced the web just yet.

As already mentioned above, the Toxic is one of the most anticipated cards of this summer, which should virtually make it a favorite on the market.