Sapphire Radeon HD4870 Toxic

Since the Toxic edition of the HD4870 is £30 more expensive than thestock version and it has three key improvements over the latter, itfollows that if each one is worth ten pounds of your money, then thisis the card to buy.

For a start, it comes with the full fat 1GBof memory, and while it may not allow the card to achievestratospherically higher scores than the 512MB HD4870, the gap betweenthis and the HD4850 is the difference between playable and not playableat high quality settings – even though both are saddled with the samenumber of ROPs. It's absolutely worth the investment of ten pounds ifyou are running a larger monitor.

That's helped, of course, bythe second advantage of the Toxic. The elegant heatsink isn't justlovely to look at if you have a window in your case, it cools the cardsufficiently that Sapphire has upped the clockspeeds by a notch too –and opens up headroom for you to do the same again. That overclockdoesn't make as much overall difference as the extra memory, but itdoes help to close the gap between this card and the higher spec HD4890to something almost negligible. Again, we'd sacrifice a round at thepub for that.

The final part of the package is what seals itfor us, though. The Vapor-X cooler doesn't just let the card runfaster, it's damned near silent too. That's almost worth the extra £30alone if your ears are as fan battered as ours have become over theyears.

Compared to its closest NVIDIA rival, the GTX260, theToxic edition of the HD4870 has the edge too. They're pricedidentically, and performance is hard to tell apart, but in the fewbenchmarks where one card has a clear advantage it's this one.

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