Introduction

Sapphire's new HD 4890 Toxic Vapor-X uses Sapphire's exclusive Vapor-X chamber cooling technology which is designed to move heat away from the GPU as quickly as possible. Think of it as a cooling baseplate that has a heatpipe in it.

In addition to the Vapor-X cooler, Sapphire has bumped the clocks of their HD 4890 to 960 MHz core and 1050 MHz engine which is a nice increase from the stock clocks of the HD 4890 reference design.

Packaging

Sapphire uses a black high gloss packaging on their card. All the important product highlights are on the front while the back goes into more detail about the card.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + Driver CD
• 3DMark Vantage Full Version + Cyberlink PowerDVD + Cyberlink DVD Suite
• CrossFire bridge
• DVI Adapter + HDMI Adapter
• TV out Adapter
• PCI-Express power cables
• TV out cable

The Card

Sapphire uses their own Vapor-X cooler on the card which allows for greatly reduced fan noise. Just like all other HD 4890 cards the card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, the most common output configuration today. If you want to use the card with your big TV screen you can use the included HDMI adapter. In case you need an analog port you can also use the included DVI adapter.
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.


You may combine up to four HD 4890 cards in CrossFireX for better performance and image quality. It is also possible to combine HD 4890 cards with HD 4830/4850/4870 but you will take a performance hit because of the mismatched CrossFire configuration.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.