Accessories:
The accessories included with the Toxic Radeon HD4850 are about what I have come to expect from Sapphire.
In the below left image we see the hardware related items, which include a 4-pin drive to 6-pin PCI Express power adapter, a DVI to 15-pin VGA adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, an s-video to component adapter, CrossFire bridge, and an s-video to composite adapter. You are all set to output video to any type of display, and to connect to an older PSU lacking the proper power connection.
 
The above right image shows the bulk of the remaining accessories. There is a user's manual, a drivers disk, a PowerDVD disk, a DVD Suite disk, a Ruby ROM Volume II disk, and a disk containing FutureMark 3DMark Vantage. Up until now, all of the Sapphire cards I have reviewed included 3DMark06, and getting an upgrade to 3DMark Vantage is a nice extra.
Testing:
A system with the following components was used to test the Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD4850 512MB graphics card:
» ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution X48 ATX motherboard
» Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 dual core processor
» G.Skill 4GB DDR3-1600 Pi Series dual channel memory kit (at 1600MHz and 7-7-7-18)
» OCZ Technology Vendetta CPU cooler
» Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» TSST Super WriteMaster optical drive
» Nesteq EECS 700 Watt ultra quiet power supply
All tests were conducted in the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 with all updates current as of September 2008. In lieu of the driver's provided with the card, version 8.7 of the ATI Catalyst Control Center software was used.
Once booted into Windows I loaded GPU-Z v0.2.6 and the Catalyst Control Center's Overdive tab to check out the card's actual specifications. This is where I noticed that instead of the memory being overclocked to 1100MHz, it was cranked all the way up to 1150MHz. Using only the Overdive tab, you couldn't even lower the speed to 1100MHz, as 1150MHz was listed as the minimum. I then loaded up AMD's GPU Clock Tool, which could have fixed this extra overclock issue, but I decided to leave it as is. What I wanted to do was enable the GPU's thermal sensor, since no temperature data was being reported on the Overdrive tab, either.
With the two issues noted, it was time to proceed to testing. For comparison purposes the following three cards were tested head to head with the 512MB Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD4850:
» Sapphire Radeon HD4870 512MB
» Sapphire Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB
» ASUS EAH3870 TOP Overclocked Radeon HD3870 512MB
The following table summarizes the features and specifications of all four cards as tested:
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