Sapphire HD4890 1GB Toxic PCI-e Video Card

The last few months have been very exciting here at the Club, especially in the world of graphics cards.  Since the beginning of April, we have had the pleasure of not only looking at the performance of the brand new RV790 based HD4890s, which have since taken the world by storm.  Of course, it was only a matter of time before the non-reference OC editions of the 4890 started making their way into the market; and as usual Sapphire is at the forefront with a wide selection of different cards to choose from. 

In fact, Sapphire has unleashed three new 4890 editions:

• The Vapor-X edition, clocked at 870MHz and priced at $229

• The Toxic edition, clocked at 960MHz, and priced at $259

• The Atomic edition, clocked at 1GHz, and priced at $299

Fortunately for us, Sapphire has enough kindness in their hearts to send us both the Toxic and Atomic editions to take a look; today we will be taking an in-depth look at the Toxic edition, next week we will have the results of the Atomic edition. 

Features and Specifications:

• I/O Output: Dual DL-DVI-I + HDMI

• Core Clock: 960MHz

• Memory Clock: 1050 MHz

• PCI-e 2.0 x16 Interface

• 1GB of GDDR5, 256-bit memory interface

• Dual Slot Vapor-X cooler with heatpipes

• HDMI compliance via converter

• 7.1 Audio Channel support

• DirectX 10.1 Support

• Shader Model 4.1 Support

• Industry leading Vapor-X Technology

• 1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin power connectors for enhanced overclockability

• 800 Stream Processors

• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering

• Quad mode ATI CrossfireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance

• PCI Express 2.0 Support

• Dynamic Geometric acceleration

• Game physics processing capability

• ATI Avivo HD video and display technology, including Unified Video Decoder 2 for BluRay and HD-DVD, Accelerated Video Transcoding, DVD Upscaling, and Dynamic Contrast.