Final Thoughts

The decision to go down the Zalman cooling path was a good idea; it's helped drop the temperatures to a level we're a lot more comfortable with and makes us feel more confident about having the card overclocked.

As we previously mentioned, while the stock cooler on the HD 4850 never caused us any issues, we would have preferred the temps to be lower than what they were. This becomes an even bigger deal when you throw overclocking into the mix or the fact that you may have a small case with limited airflow.

Sapphire have really done a lot right with this card. Apart from the cooling solution, the overclock gives us a nice out of the box performance increase compared to the stock model and we're fully loaded up with a number of applications including a full version copy of 3DMark Vantage.

While Crossfire continues to be hit and miss in a lot of games, at least with two cards we don't see a drop in performance like we do when we add three or four cards into the mix. Crossfire still isn't a bad option, though, as in some applications we do see increases and it's a technology that AMD and the ATI driver team continue to work on.

If you find yourself wanting a HD 4850 that packs a bit more punch and cools significantly better than the stock solution, don't be afraid of spending the extra few dollars to go down the TOXIC route.