According to the listing over at Geizhals.at, Sapphire's new HD 4850 cards might be closer than we think. Austrian e-tailer 12schlagzu.at has listed both Sapphire's HD 4850 with 1GB of GDDR3 memory and Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 Toxic.

Unfortunately, the specs are the same as those on the reference HD 4850 card, so we don't know how high Sapphire managed to overclock the RV770Pro core on its Toxic card, but at least we do know that they are coming.

The Sapphire HD 4850 1024MB GDDR3 card is currently listed here with a price tag of €191.62, and it is cheaper than Asus's card. On the other hand, Asus's 1GB HD 4850 is cooled by the Glaciator fan and we still don't know the type of cooling on the Sapphire card.

The Sapphire HD 4850 Toxic is listed here with a price tag set at €177.38. This makes it the highest priced HD 4850 card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, but if the cooler is anything like the one on the Sapphire HD 3870 Toxic card, then Sapphire might have a winner on their hands.

The non-reference HD 4850 cards are slowly starting to show up, and we can hardly wait to see more and more of them. You can find the entire Sapphire HD 4800 series listed here.