Sapphire HD 4850 Dual Slot

The Radeon HD 4850 Dual Slot is Sapphire’s newest Radeon 4850 card offering, and in our 100% subjective opinion, it’s the best-looking 4850 card on the market today. Even our 1600x1200 images don’t do this card justice; it’s a real head turner.

The real irony though in comparison to the Toxic 4850 is the dual-slot card’s board design. Given Sapphire’s history of selling high-end cards with custom board designs and cooling under their Toxic and Ulimate lines, you’d expect the pricier Toxic 4850 to be the card with the custom board design, but actually it’s Sapphire’s less flashy, cheaper HD 4850 Dual Slot that features the custom design!

As far as we can tell, Sapphire’s tweaks to the ATI reference board design are focused on improving the efficiency of the 4850 card. The most obvious change Sapphire has integrated is a shorter PCB. The PCB of the 4850 Dual Slot measures in at just over 8”, whereas ATI’s reference board design call for a 9.5” PCB. The shorter PCB should allow Sapphire’s 4850 Dual Slot to fit more easily in small cases such as Shuttle’s XPC line.


After looking at the Sapphire 4850 Dual Slot side-by-side with the Toxic 4850, it really highlights all the empty space on ATI’s reference 4850 board design.

What modifications has Sapphire made to get their board so short?


The first tweak they’ve implemented is shifting the 2-phase power circuitry from the back of the board, just underneath the external PCIe power connector on ATI’s reference design to the front of the board, just behind the dual-link DVI connectors and ahead of the RV770 GPU. In fact, Sapphire has moved a number of additional capacitors to the opposite side of the board as well.

With the power now up front, Sapphire has placed the RV770 GPU further back on the PCB of their 4850 Dual Slot board. Why Sapphire has completely reversed the layout of their dual-slot board is unknown to us, we’re assuming Sapphire’s engineers must have some reason but we weren’t able to get a firm answer in time for this article’s publication.


Besides the tweaked PCB, Sapphire has also come up with their own custom dual-slot heatsink/fan unit for the 4850 Dual Slot. At the heart of the cooler is a copper slug that rests directly above the RV770 chip, pulling heat off the GPU. This copper slug is then surrounded by a light gray Orb-shaped heatsink that is composed entirely out of aluminum. The heatsink’s task is to keep the copper slug cool.



By using a combination of copper and aluminum, Sapphire is able to keep costs down while maximizing cooling performance. As anyone who follows the commodity market can tell you, copper prices have risen dramatically over the past year, so it just wasn’t cost effective for Sapphire to build their GPU cooler entirely from copper (the all-copper Toxic sells for about $20 more than the dual-slot 4850). Sapphire’s copper/aluminum mixture also has the added benefit of being lighter weight than an all-copper cooler.

Keeping the cooler supplied with fresh air is an 80mm fan.

Unlike the Toxic board, Sapphire sticks to ATI’s stock clock speeds for the 4850 Dual Slot. The GPU runs at 625MHz while the board’s memory operates at 993MHz.

Hardware and software bundle

Sapphire ships the 4850 Dual Slot with the exact same bundle of hardware and software accessories as the Toxic 4850. This is pretty surprising considering the lower price of the Dual Slot card, but we definitely won’t complain. In case you missed it, Sapphire’s software bundle includes the full version of 3DMark Vantage, Ruby Rom, CyberLink PowerDVD, and a CyberLink’s DVD Suite which includes PowerProducer 4, PowerDirector 5 Express, Power2GO 5.5, and Medi@show 3.

Hardware accessories bundled with the card include an HDMI adapter, DVI adapter, CrossFire bridge connector, component video cable, and power adapter.