The launch of the Radeon HD 5000 series has been a noticeably different than other major GPU launches in the last half-decade. Process problems over at TSMC and a lack of a competitive card from NVIDIA has resulted in a level of demand that until this year could not be satiated. Cypress chips were going out the door to stores practically as fast as they came out of the fab, leaving card vendors with too few chips to do custom card lines. What we have seen up until now has been limited to reference cards, with only minor variations such as a different cooler or a BIOS that allows voltage control. The supply of Cypress chips has only finally reached the point where there’s a suitable number of them for card vendors to produce a custom design.

Today Sapphire is launching a pair of Radeon HD 5850 cards: the 5850 Vapor-X and the 5850 Toxic Edition. Both of these cards use a new custom design – a custom PCB, custom chokes, and of course a custom cooler – making the set of them the first custom 5850 on the market. Both are factory overclocked, with the Vapor-X clocking in at 735MHz/1050MHz, and the Toxic at 765MHz/1125MHz, and are otherwise identical. Sapphire tells us that only the Toxic will be launching in North America, while the Vapor-X will be available elsewhere. As such, today we were looking at their 5850 Toxic Edition.

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