March 31st, 2010
Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic 1GB Video Card Review
Last month Sapphire released the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic, which is a custom designed ATI Radeon HD 5850 that looks nothing like the reference designed board that it is derived from. The Sapphire ‘Toxic’ Radeon HD 5850 1GB card that we have here today is clocked at 765MHz on the core and 1125MHz (4500MHz effective) on the memory, which gives it a significant boost in clock speed over the reference design’s 700MHz core clock and 1000MHz memory clock speeds.
The card also comes with Sapphire’s Vapor-X technology that should allow the card to run 15 degrees C cooler and 10dB quieter than the standard models, while providing additional headroom for even higher overclocking.
The Sapphire HD 5850 TOXIC Edition is a Sapphire is just like any other Radeon HD 5850 graphics card and has 1440 stream processors and 72 texture units that need to be kept cool. Sapphire has kept the card nice and cool thanks to the custom three heat-pipe heatsink and the large eleven blade cooling fan that is placed directly above the GPU core. The fan shroud on the Sapphire HD 5850 TOXIC Edition is nice looking and is also a one off piece that was designed just for this card. It should be noted that this fan is a two ball bearing model and is rather quiet for a video card! (…)
