Sapphire has today announced a new-and-improved version of the Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC graphics card introduced earlier this year.
The upgraded model, pictured above, retains all the goodness of the existing model, but comes equipped with a massive 2GB frame buffer - double that of the previous card.
Call us paranoid, but Sapphire's timing suggests the HD 5850 2G TOXIC Edition is aimed squarely at NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 470.
Designed to raise the performance provided by AMD's reference design, Sapphire's custom card comes factory overclocked with the GPU running at 765MHz and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory hitting an effective 4,500MHz. For comparison's sake, that's up from 725MHz and 4,000MHz, respectively, for a stock-clocked alternative.
The icing on the cake is Sapphire's exclusive Vapor-X cooler, which promises to lower temperatures by up to 15°C and shave another 10dB off the noise level. Who knows, it might even provide further overclocking headroom.
Sapphire's also keen to point out that "all of this comes with the modest active power consumption of less than 160W – and using Dynamic Power Management the card has a new super low-power idle mode at less than 30W."
The card supports up to three monitors via ATI Eyefinity and comes equipped with dual-link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors.
Exactly how it compares to the GeForce GTX 470 remains to be seen, but should the NVIDIA card prove to be superior in terms of performance, which would you choose if Sapphire's card proved to be cheaper to own, cheaper to run, and both cooler and quieter, too?
Conjecturing somewhat, it would make sense for Sapphire to give the pre-overclocked and double frame buffer treatment to the Radeon HD 5870 - creating a card that could prove to be a thorn in the side of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480. It's heating up, folks. Stay tuned for a GPU showdown later this week.
Press release: NOW 2G FOR SAPPHIRE HD 5850 TOXIC
