Elite Bastards examine the first non-reference Radeon HD 4850 board in the form of Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 TOXIC.

Compared to the reference core clock speed of 625MHz, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 TOXIC boasts a 50MHz factory overclock, leaving us with a final core clock speed of 675MHz for this board. Memory clocks see a more impressive increase in speed however, with a factory clock of 1100MHz used here, some way above the 993MHz reference memory clock.

Of course, aside from those clock speed bumps, the real news here is the use of a third-party cooler, and taking a look at the board itself we get our first glimpse of it. The solution on show will doubtless be instantly recognisable to many of you as a part provided by Zalman - We've seen their offerings put to good use on other graphics boards in the past, so it certainly seems like a pretty good choice. While the cooler itself doesn't cover the board's memory modules, heatsinks are attached to cool the RAM to some degree as well.

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 TOXIC 512MB video card review