Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic 1GB video card review

Given its Toxic subtitle, it's fair to expect some factory overclocks from Sapphire's offering here, and thankfully that's exactly what we get, with the company boosting that 725MHz reference core clock speed to 765MHz (a modest 40MHz increase) while the card's 1GB of GDDR5 gets some real attention, with the 1000MHz memory sported by a stock card upgraded to a blistering 1125MHz on the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic.

While Sapphire's Radeon HD 5870 went for a rugged-looking cooling solution, the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic goes for something rather more shiny and colourful, with a dual-slot cooler that covers the entirety of the PCB's front, while also positioning itself to exhaust any hot air reasonably well from the rear of the system chassis.