Introduction

Since the launch of the new ATI Radeon 5000 HD Series of video cards, multiple manufacturers have come to market with their versions in this series. Unfortunately, many are relatively the same - these boards, GPUs and heatsinks are purchased from ATI, and the manufacturer who releases the product places their brand (logo) on the box and heatsink. These video cards are termed “reference cards” and we usually see reference boards at the initial release of a video card. Reference cards are usually stock releases of the video card and have nothing special added which means no matter which manufacturer you choose to purchase it from, it is the same as the next.

Shortly following the initial release is when we start to see these manufacturers producing cards in the series to set them apart from the others. Some may add different cooling solutions or a pre overclocked version.  This is where the separation begins and we find out what makes one manufacturer's video card different from another. Sapphire Technologies has done this with many of their 5000 series Radeon HD video cards and have done it again with the launch of the Sapphire Radeon HD5850 Toxic Edition.

The Sapphire Radeon HD5850 Toxic Edition is not only an overclocked version of the HD5850, it also contains Sapphire's own cooling solution. The Sapphire HD5850 Toxic Edition comes standard with Sapphire's patented Vapor-X dual slot heatsink and fan. Vapor-X is vapor chamber technology cooling and was developed by Sapphire in 2007. The Toxic 5850 is also factory overclocked to 765MHz core and 1125MHz (4500MHz effective) memory speeds which are 40MHz (core) and 125MHz (memory) respectively, above a stock Radeon HD5850.