14 DAY TRIAL // Now that NVIDIA is finally getting very close to launching its own DirectX 11-capable graphics adapters, AMD's partners are preparing devices meant to hold their own against the GTX 470 and GTX 480. In fact, a recently leaked set of benchmarks seems to point out a clear superiority of the GTX 480 compared with the Radeon HD 5870, which is all the more reason for manufacturers to raise the stakes themselves. Sapphire, for instance, has chosen to debut a special version of the HD 5850, with more memory and better cooling.
The new Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic is different from the reference card in two main ways. One is its higher amount of memory, namely 2GB of GDDR5. The other feature is the use of the Vapor-X cooling mechanism, which, the manufacturer claims, is both more efficient and quieter than the one used on the reference model.
The other specifications include support for DirectX 11 graphics (obviously), the Cypress GPU running at 765MHz, the memory operating at 4,500MHz, a 256-bit interface, 1,440 stream processors, 72 texture units and multiple display outputs, namely DisplayPort, Dual-DVI and HDMI. The stock model, by comparison, has clocks of 725MHz for the GPU and of 4,000MHz for the memory.
“Designed for the enthusiast or demanding user, the SAPPHIRE HD 5850 2G TOXIC Edition is factory overclocked to 765MHz core and has 2GB of high speed DDR5 memory clocked at 1125MHz (4500MHz effective). SAPPHIRE’s World leading Vapor-X technology not only allows the cards to run as much as 15 degrees C cooler and 10dB quieter than the standard models, it provides additional headroom for further performance tuning (overclocking),” the press release states.
As its stock counterpart, the device supports the ATI Stream technology and ATI Eyefinity technologies. The Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic should start selling this week, at a price of 289 Euro.