Introduction

My first video card was a Radeon 9600 Pro. At the time, the back-and-forth pendulum action between ATI and nVidia had swung in ATI's direction, nVidia didn't have anything that compared to the Radeon 9800/9600 series. My next card was by nVidia, as were the next few after that, mainly because when it came time for a new card, the pendulum had swung nVidia's way, or an nVidia card happened to be an available review item.

My next ATI card was an HD 3850, which in my opinion was a much underrated GPU, mostly due to being so overshadowed by the HD 3870, which was in direct competition with the popular geForce 8800GT. The HD 3850 totally blew away its real competition, the geForce 8600GTS and 8600GT, though was a little on the expensive side until it was close to the end of its run.

I suppose that's why I have never felt any particular allegiance to either ATI or nVidia, I have used and have been impressed by video cards from both companies. Most of my video cards have been mid-range, and both companies have done well over the years producing middle-of-the-road gaming GPUs, allowing those of us on a budget to still be able to play the latest game titles with good playability at slightly lowered settings.

nVidia's current lineup of GPUs is a little confusing, but ATI's is pretty simple, as was the last generation. They have two models, presently the 4850 and the 4870. The 4850 is the mid-range card, and the 4870 is their upper-end card. For an extreme card, you have a pair of either GPU in an "X2" version.

Sapphire Technology, a Hong Kong based company, has been around since 2001, and is ATI's largest partner. They exclusively build ATI based video cards, and motherboards with AMD chipsets.

Today I will be looking at one of Sapphire's latest video cards, the Radeon HD 4850 Toxic, a 512MB DDR3 factory overclocked version of the HD 4850. This card comes complete with ramsinks, the first I have had on a video card that I didn't install myself, and a Zalman heatpipe cooler. Will the HD 4850 impress me as much at the HD 3850 did? How will it fare against the cards I plan to compare it to? Read on to see!

Specifications

Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 4850
GPU: ATI RV770
Manufacturing Process: 55nm
Core Clock: 675 MHz
Stream Processors: 800
Memory: 512 MB GDDR3 memory 256-bit memory interface
Memory Clock: 1100MHz, 2200 Mbps
Interface: PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
DirectX: DirectX 10.1

Features

- Dual Slot Active Cooler
- HDMI compliant via dongle
- 7.1 Audio Channel Support
- Shader Model 4.1 support
- I/O Output: Dual DL-DVI-I+HDTV
- 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high-performance anisotropic filtering
- ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
- Use up to four discrete cards with an AMD 790FX based motherboard
- Dynamic geometry acceleration
- Game physics processing capability
- ATI Avivo HD video and display technology via Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-Ray and HD Video
- Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
- On-chip HDCP
- ATI PowerPlay technology

Packaging

The HD 4850 comes in a sharp looking black sleeved box with mostly white lettering. It reminds me of a few album covers I've seen over the years. The rear of the box is covered with information.

The video card inside is protected by two layers of thick eggcrate foam, the best protected video card I've received. When I removed the card, the box was still pretty heavy, due to the bundle.