When sweet excess just isn't enough, you can always turn to Sapphire's three-fan Toxic giant.
There's always going to be someone out there who's gonna want the best. They're gonna roar down the street through a school zone in their million-dollar car, blasting out some new-fangled hip hop beats from their sound system that sounds better than real life ever could, and they're exactly the type of people who this card is aimed at - those who accept nothing less than top performance. Does that mean this is the perfect card for all? Well, perhaps not.
Specifications for such a card are certainly amongst the most impressive we've seen yet, packing two fully-fledged RV870 cores underneath its hulking frame. These cores contain the highest processor count of the entire 5xxx family, and combined they provide a total of 3200 shader units that work in unison, each synchronised at a core clock of 900MHz. This is a significant boost on standard 5970 clockspeeds, which usually run at a meagre 725MHz, and is an impressive factory-guaranteed speed. Coupled to each core is a 256-bit wide memory bus that interfaces with 2GB of the fastest GDDR5, clocked at a memory speed of 1200MHz for an effective 4800MHz.
Some might say that as each core has access to two whole gigabytes of memory that the card's total is four; well, that's not entirely true. The card's construction is such that it's best pictured as two separate cards that just happen to be located on the one piece of silicon, and the nature of graphical work means that the memory data is duplicated between the cards as they perform their duties - not quite four, but two is still more than enough.
An expected by-product of two overclocked cards sharing the same space is one of heat and power consumption - the Toxic demands two 8-pin PCIe 150W power connectors to provide a phenomenal amount of power to the two cores, in addition to the 75W available to it through the PCIe slot. A side effect of using this much electricity is inevitably the generation of heat, which pours out of the card under load. It wasn't quite enough to make the card unstable, though it noticeably affected other system components such as the DDR3 memory and processor heatsink. High airflow is certainly needed to remove this excess heat leakage.
There is an impressive cooler applied to the card, which consists of two copper plates and five heatpipes, and an entanglement of aluminium fins, boasting three 92mm frameless fans. While heat measurement and overclocking was impossible due to time constraints, the nature of this design means that it struggles to force enough air through the tightly-spaced fins at lower revolutions, forcing the fans to spin faster and generate more noise. The Toxic is certainly noticeable, and audible above any background din.
Performance is astounding, though, and the two overclocked cores that power the card return some of the fastest scores we've seen in testing yet. 3DMark Vantage is boosted by roughly 4000 points compared to a reference 5970, while Unigine burns through other cards to give an almost-playable experience under Extreme tessellation - typically unheard of for a single card. Interestingly we ran into a slight driver headache when attempting to run GRID at any resolution over 1280x1024; a setting not worth testing at with frames generated in the hundreds.
And yes, it can run Crysis.
There's even copies of Modern Warfare 2 and Dirt 2 thrown in to sweeten the already tempting deal, though you'll cringe once you see the price - almost as much as an entire system would cost. You'll pay for the fastest, but in this case, we're almost tempted to suggest an alternative instead.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012