14 DAY TRIAL // Long time AMD partner Sapphire, has just announced the introduction of a new factory overclocked Toxic graphics card that is based on the Radeon HD 6950 design, but comes with a customized printed circuit board and cooling system.
Compared to the reference HD 6950, Sapphire's latest creation is chilled with the help of a vapor chamber that gets fresh air form a blower fan placed at the back of the plastic shroud covering the card, while the backplate has been perforated to increase airflow out of the system case.
Together with the cooling system, the graphics card's PCB was also redesigned to feature a new high-quality digital VRM which gets its power from the 8 and 6 pin power connectors installed.
These changes allowed the Chinese company to increase the operating clocks of the Radeon HD 6950 Toxic over AMD's reference values.
What this basically means is that the GPU is now clocked at 880MHz, compared to the 800HMz of the standard Cayman Pro core, while the 2GB of DDR5 video buffer memory runs at 1300MHz (5200MHz data rate).
Performance can be further enhanced with the Sapphire TriXX overclocking tool, which allows users to adjust both memory and core clock speeds as well as voltages. The setting uncovered by using the utility can then be saved into one of the two BIOS profiles the card can supports.
Connectivity wise, Sapphires HD 6950 Toxic carries two DVI ports, one HDMI 1.4a port as well as a pair of mini DisplayPort 1.2 outputs and is compatible with 4-monitor Eyefinity setups.
Sapphire hasn't provided us with any information regarding the price, or the release date, of the Radeon HD 6950 Toxic.
The Radeon HD 6950 is based on AMD's Cayman Pro graphics core and it includes 1408 stream processors, 88 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus.