Sapphire Toxic HD 7970 GHz Edition Review

Ah, The Toxic cards from Sapphire! One of the most reputed series of cards in my sight!

These have a very nice way of saying thing with the looks and the cooler has always been effective! The cards are supposed to be the best of the best and give the best gaming performance is it is a flagship card from Sapphire. The card has been blessed with Sapphire's lethal boost technology which basically allows overclocking up to 1200 MHz and the Memory to 1600 MHz provided that you are not running hot!

Better VRAM pays off when you have high resolutions and stepped up Anti-Aliasing to a whole new level! Sapphire put in the efforts to take it to a whole 6GB of GDDR5 on a PCI-E 3.0 Controller and this adds a whole new level to it. So, conclusion from the statement can be the target of Sapphire. Basically "Gamers".

So, getting on to Eyefinity, nobody will say that you are going to need an Eyefinity edition of the card to run multiple monitors, it can be done easily using splitters! But can the AMD's Tahiti under the Massive cooler handle this ?

Sapphire, gave the Toxic edition a hit with the Highest-End board in the market from itself which allows the built-in TDP limiter to push the clocks behind the thermal rate!

The card runs a 6GB memory at 1600 MHz (6600 MHz Effective) and that is quite blessed :P

Now, the card features 1 x Dual-Link DVI, 1 x Single-Link DVI, 1 x HDMI and 2 x Mini Display Connectors and all of this on 6GB VRAM.

BTW, what do you get when you pay so many bucks? Well, you are special as the cooler is specifically designed for the card with an all new Vapor Chamber.

So, the card goes pretty thick (Almost 3 Slots) and pretty cool with its 4 heatpipes !

The back of the PCB is covered too with a support plate to cool the Memory and is in good shape!

So, in here, Sapphire has got an 8 + 1 + 1 Phase design and dubbed Lethal power modules. Eight phases are there for the GPU while others for the Memory.

Sapphire gave us Black Diamond Chokes, MOSFETs and DirectFET Technology by International Rectifiers on both the sides. For everything else, there's the Heatsink.

The power regulator was from CHiL and there were 2 X 8-Pin power connectors seen. Ah my favorite part,    Next we saw a button, I just pressed the button to notice a great performance difference! NOT to my surprise, it was the Lethal Boost button right next to the CrossfireX Connectors!

Coming to an end, after overclocking, the performance had a considerable increase and the fan noise was quite low. The temperatures were under control and the card proved to be very stable.

Now, attaching 6 Monitors (1920 X 1080), we launched Crysis 2 with DX11 at high resolution and got ~17 FPS! And it was exciting as with 4 Displays (1920 X 1080) we could get ~20 FPS. Not much of a difference though but the card pays off!

Sapphire also has done a very nice job with robust VRMs. They do not heat much and are pretty robust hence giving a massive headroom for overclocking.

So, at the bottom

I would say, just go for it as it may not be the best but with further firmware updates, the card will have better performance. Plus, the card's Vapor-X Technology makes the full use of its capabilities.

Kudos,

Kush