Final Words and Conclusion

The Sapphire Radeon HD4870 Toxic is certainly an exciting piece of kit. With a custom cooling solution, overclocked frequencies and 1GB of GDDR5 memory the card is everything you’d want from a HD4870. Sapphire has been thoroughly enjoying the last year with AMD and this card is a perfect showcase for the standards set throughout 2008.

The previous 4870 Toxic from Sapphire was limited by the 512MB of memory which meant at times over 1680x1050 the card could run out of texture memory but this 1gb version is set to satisfy high resolution gamers wanting a pre overclocked solution.

The card carries a custom cooler to deal with the extra heat; due to this it only hits load figures of around 70c which is markedly better than the reference cooling solution. The great thing is that it achieves this without creating a racket and if you like gaming without a lot of fan noise, this card is a viable option.  The card also comes with Sapphire’s standard 2 year warranty.

According to Sapphire the current MSRP of the product is £212.75 inc VAT - for comparison we recently took a look at the BFG GTX260 MaxCore OC versus the Gainward 1GB HD4870 Golden Sample. The Gainward card is similarly clocked to the 4870 1GB Toxic from Sapphire (Sapphire card has a 5MHz core advantage) and also carries a custom cooling solution. In our testing we found that it was able to keep up with the OC MaxCore in some of the tests but the GTX managed to pull ahead in a few areas.

That said, both these cards retail for around £240-£250 inc vat, putting them in a completely different price bracket to the Sapphire 4870 Toxic 1GB. Taking the information presented here into account and the outstanding quality of the Sapphire card it earns our highest recommendation.