Ballistics Report Sapphire Toxic 4850

Pros

Radeon 4850 GPU: ATI’s Radeon 4850 GPU is the price/performance champ right now. ATI equips the 4850 GPU with 800 stream processing units running at 625MHz. The chip also supports DirectX 10.1. Combined these features not only give the GPU the shading horsepower for today’s latest games, but tomorrow’s as well.

In regards to power consumption, the chip is also the performance/watt champ. In our testing, the board consumes less energy then even NVIDIA’s new 55-nm GeForce 9800 GTX+ while delivering similar or better levels of performance. Unlike the 9800 GTX series which requires two PCIe power connectors, the 4850 needs just one.

The only real downside to the 4850 has been its single-slot cooler. Fortunately Sapphire has addressed this issue in spades with the Zalman VF900.

Zalman VF900-Cu Cooling: Thanks to its all-copper construction and dual heatpipes, Zalman’s VF900-Cu is able to cool the Radeon 4850 like no other cooler we’ve tested. Idle temps were 22 degrees cooler than ATI’s stock cooler, while the Toxic 4850 ran 28 degrees cooler than ATI’s cooler under load!

The really sweet part is that the VF900-Cu is able to pull this off while barely generating any noise.

OC’ed Clock Speeds: Clocked at 685MHz on the GPU and 1.1GHz memory, the Toxic 4850 runs at the fastest clock speeds of any 4850 that’s been announced to date.

Cons

Pricier than other dual-slot 4850s: The Sapphire Toxic 4850’s price can actually be a pro or a con depending on your perspective. On the “pro” side, consider the cost of buying a Radeon 4850 card and a Zalman VF900 cooler. Judging by Newegg’s latest prices, the cheapest 4850 is priced at $153 after mail-in rebate, while the Zalman cooler sells for $40 on Newegg. Altogether that adds up to $193.

Sapphire’s Toxic board sells for $180 after rebate, a savings of $13. And don’t forget that the Toxic is also OC’ed and ships with a nice software bundle.

On the other hand, if you absolutely must stick to a strict $160 budget, the Toxic may not be for you, as it’s priced higher than other Radeon 4850 boards. But that’s where Sapphire’s 4850 Dual Slot comes in…