Final thoughts and rating
Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC 512MB elevated frequencies give it around a 6 per cent advantage in most tests when compared to a vanilla card, shown by the difference in aggregate framerates across the four games.
Overall performance, then, sits between a Radeon HD 4870/GeForce GTX 260 (192-core) and a pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 260 (216-core).
The £35 premium over a stock card brings marginally greater performance but, more importantly, a cooler that's better than the reference in many ways - not least with respect to quietness and temperatures.
Sapphire's bundle, too, is better than most other AIBs' so the decision on whether it makes sense for you lies with just how quiet and cool you want a high-end graphics card to be. Want it cool? Go for the £210 package. Not bothered? Then opt for the cheapest Radeon HD 4870 512MB or GeForce GTX 260 896MB you can find: both are pretty damn good.
There's significant competition for Sapphire in the
pre-overclocked Radeon HD 4870 market, not least from PowerColor,
but the Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC 512MB has enough going for it to
be put on a shortlist of graphics-card upgrades if your budget is
around £200.
Just make sure you can find it in-stock at a number of (r)etailers: we
can't!
The good
Very quiet cooler in both 2D and 3D.
Excellent temperatures when compared to reference-clocked card.
GDDR5 memory scaled to a blistering 4.3GHz in our overclocking tests.
Decent bundle
The not so good
£35 premium over a regular card will be hard to
stomach for some.
Pure performance isn't that much greater than a reference card.
Competition means that a pre-overclocked 1GB card is available for
similar money.
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS scores products out of a possible 10. A score for an average-rated product, therefore, is a meaningful ‘5’, and not ‘9/10’, which is common practice for a great many other publications.
HEXUS considers any product score above '5' as a safe buy. The
higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy.
Simple, straightforward buying advice.
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC 512MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC 512MB is currently on pre-order for £210. We expect most etailers to have plentiful stock within a week.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any Sapphire representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
