14 DAY TRIAL // With all the buzz surrounding the DirectX 11-capable Fermi graphics adapters from NVIDIA, which are still in short supply unfortunately, the AMD war camp was not bound to stay docile for long. In fact, AMD's partners have been known to be working on special editions of the HD 5970, meant to blast any semblance of competition out of the sky. This is exactly what Sapphire aims for with its HD 5970 Toxic.
The Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 4GB is one of the multiple special editions of the dual-GPU adapter that will have no less than 4GB of GDDR5 memory and higher clocks than the reference model. In fact, the hardware maker used a pair of 8-pin PCI Express power connectors to remove the power limitation that prevented the base card from coming with clocks as high as it otherwise might have. Of course, this means that the PSU supporting the system will have to be especially capable.
The 5970 Toxic has 3,200 stream processors, two Cypress GPUs, each clocked at 900MHz and the 4GB of memory operating on a 2x256-bit memory interface and at a frequency of 4,800MHz. The adapter also boasts dual DVI and mini-DisplayPort outputs, for Eyefinity triple-display scenarios, and can also be set up in CrossFireX multi-GPU configurations.
Consumers familiar with custom cards will likely expect the cooling module to be less than ordinary, which is logical considering the special heat-dispersing needs of such a specification set. Sapphire implemented an Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme, which has four nickel-plated copper heatpipes and three 92mm fans.
End-users may be either upset or relieved to know that the company did not disclose the price of this product. Those faint of heart should beware, however, as Sapphire has already started shipping samples of the card, which means that it should not be too long before it reaches stores.