Introduction

Just the other day, I went to a friend’s house to fix one of his computers since he was having a problem with his video card crashing for no specific reason. The first thing I noticed as I walked into his computer room was how much warmer it was than the rest of the house.  After commenting on that and shutting off his media player, I heard a high pitched whining sound coming from his case. I asked him what it was and he told me he had to keep his ZeroTherm VGA cooler at 100% or his video card would freeze. Right there, I knew that heat was his issue and immediately went to check his heatsink for dust build up and to make sure that he had some decent heatsink paste on the GPU. Both were fine but he did have an older ATI card and was overclocking it.

We live in Florida and heat is an issue, if we cool our houses too much our electric bills are extremely high, if we choose to find a logical median where it may be comfortable, our electronics suffer. Cooling then becomes one of the most important issues when we want to protect our computer components.

The Sapphire HD 4890 Toxic is a preoverclcked ATI 4890, which comes with Sapphire's Vapor-X heatsink and fan. The Sapphire HD 4890 Toxic is built around the ATI RV790 graphics processor,  which is a 55nm chip that has 800 streaming processors. The Toxic is one of three overclocked versions of the HD 4890 that utilize the Sapphire Vapor-X heatsink and fan cooling solution and it is priced in the middle of those two other cards. (Atomic and Vapor-X)