Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC - Introduction

It is hard to believe that it’s been 5 months since ATI launched their 5000 series of GPUs. In that timeframe we have seen the release of 9 different models from the low end 5450 to the enthusiast 5970. At each price level manufacturers try to differentiate their cards from the rest of the market with the inclusion of free items or enhanced specifications.

One family of cards which has impressed us in the past is Sapphire’s Vapor-X and Toxic models which offer significantly improved cooling over reference designs. They often boast enhanced speeds as well.

On our test bench today we have a version of the Radeon HD 5850 which has received the Toxic treatment. We will demonstrate how it compares to the reference design 5850 and the GeForce GTX 285 in a selection of real world gaming, multimedia and GPU computing tests.