AMD released their 4800 series of graphics cards this past summer with unanimous praise in both price, performance, and features. Nvidia's cards were so overpriced they nearly had to slash cards prices in half to compete with AMD. That said though there was one major problem of the first 4800 cards on the market: heat. Today we'll be taking a look at a card that looks to take care of this and also comes pre-overclocked, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Toxic.

Sapphire has become known for it's TOXIC Edition cards which use their Vapor-X cooler with vapour chamber technology for better cooling but this 4870 TOXIC also features three large heatpipes and a thermally controlled fan which run quiet in all of our testing. We tested this with Crysis GPU benchmark set to run on a loop at 1920x1200 at Very High Settings and using ATI's Catalyst COntrol Center we measured a temperature of 63 degrees Celsius after ten minutes in the loop. This is cooler than some 4800 cards run at idle so this is a big win for Sapphire. At idle in the desktop we measured the card at 51 degrees Celsius. Excellent all around.

 
The card is also overclocked out of the box as mentioned at 780MHz for the core and 1GHz for the 512MB of GDDR5 memory. We were able to max out ATI's Overdrive feature for a core of 820MHz and memory clock speed. This gave a nice speed boost though not a huge margin you'll see the card does perform better than a stock 4870 all around.

Looking at the bundle Sapphire provides there are quite a few goodies here. Ruby ROM RubyROM includes demos of Call of Juarez, John Woo's Stranglehold, Dungeon Runners, screensaver Earth Sim, GameShadow, and various wallpapers and screensavers. Also included is CyberLink PowerDVD 7 Cyberlink DVD Suite, drivers and Sapphire and ATI case sticker, and also 3DMark's latest benchmark, Vantage.

The hardware bundle consist of HDTV out dongle, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, DVI-to-VGA adapter, molex to PCI-Express power adapters, and Crossfire dongle for your graphics card.

The card its self is fairly sharp with a black sticker with Sapphire's logo as well as ATI and the TOXIC branding as well as Vapor-X with a large fan in the middle. The three heatpipes poke out on top and is aesthetically pleasing card all around with the blue PCB.

We've covered the technology of the 4800 but let's give a quick recap. For one this is a second generation of the 55nm manufacturing process AMD introduced last year which uses less power, it features a new UVD2 H.264 decoding for Blu-Ray for less CPU overhead and picture-in-picture decoding, 800 stream processors are featured up from 320 stream processors of the 3800 series, it requires two six-pin PCI-Express power adapters though as mentioned. DirectX 10.1 is fully supported which no Nvidia cards feature yet though not so many games support it at this time. Overall it is great piece of technology from AMD which has allowed them to take back over from Nvidia.