14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire has been implementing its Vapor-X treatment into whichever of its cards saw a significant popularity. One such card is AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5850 that Sapphire has redesigned with a custom PCB and is going to soon launch as part of its Toxic Series. The card has a custom-built PCB and is factory overclocked, with speeds higher than those of the reference model for the graphics processing unit and the memory.
Even though the card has not been introduced yet, it is already being listed on Overclockers UK, along with the complete list of specifications and a fine image gallery. The Toxic HD 5850 is described as having a GPU clock of 765MHz, compared to the stock 725MHz, and a memory frequency of 4500MHz, as opposed to the reference 4000MHz. In addition, the card boasts 1400 stream processors and its 1GB of GDDR5 memory operates on an interface of 256 bits.
This factory overclock is kept alive and stable by the aforementioned Vapor-X liquid cooling solution. This cooler not only allows the card itself to run at lower temperatures than would normally be possible, but it also creates less noise and provides headroom for further performance tuning. This overclocking potential makes it suited for overclockers and, in addition, the card is also made aesthetically noticeable through its dash of ray blue graphics.
Naturally, as all high-end graphics cards from the ATI Radeon HD 5xxx series, the Toxic HD 5850 features DirectX 11 and CrossFireX support, as well as the ATI Avivo HD, ATI Stream and ATI Eyefinity technologies. Video output is possible through two Dual-Link DVI-I, as well as one HDMI and one DisplayPort outputs. The device operates on the PCI Express 2.1 interface.
Currently, the Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 graphics card is listed with a two-year warranty and a price of £269.99. This price, however, will likely drop once the product is officially introduced, which will be sometime before February 15.