Final Thoughts & Conclusion

After working with two stock Radeon HD4850s, I wasn't sure what to expect from Sapphire's Toxic version of the HD4850. Performance between the stock HD3870 and HD3870 Toxic were very much in the Toxic model's favor, and my hope was that this carried on to the 4800 series.

I found the most significant improvements and performance gains in Linux, which is surprising to me. Typically, ATI support is always a little behind in Linux, but the release of the Catalyst 8.8 driver has finally optimized the driver for the 4800 series in Linux. In Windows, however, it seemed that the Catalyst 8.8 driver actually slowed performance down a small percentage.

Paired with the Linux Catalyst 8.8 driver, the Radeon HD4850 Toxic could give nVidia a run for their money. Performance of ATI cards in Linux has finally matured to a point where similar-generation cards perform reasonably equally. Catalyst 8.8 has also introduced CrossFire support in Linux, something I plan to write about in the near future. Now this leaves the question as to which company can give consumers and Linux users the lowest price.

All in all, the Radeon HD4850 Toxic is awesome. When paired with a Phenom quad-core CPU and 500W power supply, I've found no system instabilities, and the gaming performance is definitely there. The inclusion of a cooler from Zalman makes this product a great deal for enthusiasts and gamers alike, where the only downside to the card is that it takes up two PCI slots rather than one.

Pros

• PCI-Express 2.0 Support
• 512MB GDDR3
• CrossFireX Supports up to four GPUs
• HDCP / HDMI compliant for watching HD movies on HD displays
• Zalman GPU cooler keeps card cool and quiet
• Looks good!

Cons

• Takes up two expansion slots

Rating

10/10