It usually isn't too long after a new video card model has been released that we start seeing the overclocked models hit the street. Sapphire is the first to send us an overclocked ATI 4800 series card with this, The HD4850 Toxic edition.

Of course, the basic specs of the Radeon HD 4850 Toxic edition are just like the reference version. Stuff like DirectX 10.1 and CrossFireX are going to be supported. The advanced power saving ATI PowerPlay technology is there as well as full HDCP decoding with the 956 million transistors based upon a 55nm fabrication process . What you'll see if you compare the specs of the two cards side by side is a difference in clock speeds - and that should boil down to higher frame rates and bigger benchmarking scores.

     From Sapphire's Website: "....shipping with core clock speeds of 675MHz and fitted with 512MB of high speed memory operating at 1100MHz. It also features a Zalman heatpipe fan, providing more efficient cooling, quieter operation and more headroom for performance tuning."  This leads us to believe that the 4850 Toxic should be able to deliver even more performance beyond that which has been uncorked by Sapphire...but we'll get to that!