Usually there is a lag time between the introduction of factory overclocked cards as well as those with specialized cooling solutions. Then Sapphire stepped right into the fire and introduced their HD 4890 Atomic Edition just a month after the introduction of the HD 4890 roll out. Now just a month later Sapphire has let loose with 2 more HD 4890 models, the Toxic and Vapor-X models. As seen with the Atomic Edition the Sapphire derivatives are a bit above the curve when it comes to component selection, cooling capabilities and performance. The Atomic is the first 4890 clocked at a 1000MHz core clock speed while the Toxic is not far behind with a core clock speed of 960MHz. The Toxic comes to us using the same Vapor-X based cooling solution shown to be effective at harnessing the thermal load of the Atomic Edition. The first question I asked Sapphire when the HD 4890 was introduced, was will there be a Vapor X version? Obviously the answer was 'yes' as this card is designed much the same as the 4870 Vapor X Edition we looked at earlier this year.
Both the HD 4890 Toxic Edition and Vapor-X cards are based upon the R790 core with 800 shader cores built on the same 55nm process and architecture as the R770 core used on the HD 4870. Both carry 1 GB of GDDR 5 memory on a 256 bit bus using an improved memory management architecture. Higher clock speeds are the result of the improvements to the R790 core. Lets take a look at both of these new offerings from Sapphire to see just how well they compare to the existing offerings to see if there is indeed a performance advantage with the special features of these cards from Sapphire.
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