14 DAY TRIAL // Once again, a high-profile hardware company has taken a high-tier product and outfitted it with one of its best parts meant to turn it into one of the foremost representatives of its kind. In this case, AMD's well-known manufacturing partner Sapphire took the ATI Radeon HD 5870, AMD's most powerful single-GPU graphics card, and strapped its special Vapor-X cooler on it while pushing its specs higher, for a performance superior to that of the reference model.
As consumers will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, after having seen many examples of high-quality enthusiast parts getting even more powerful after a facelift and some extra cooling power, the new incarnations of the HD 5870 have either higher clocks for both the GPU and VRAM or better cooling, or both. They also boast a total memory of 2GB instead of just 1GB. For the Vapor-X, the graphics processing unit sticks to the reference speed of 850MHz, while the GDDR5 runs at 4800MHz. The Toxic takes things even further, with a GPU at 925MHz and the memory at 4900MHz.
Each of the two models boasts 1,600 stream processors and obviously supports DirectX 11 graphics (DirectCompute, Tessellation etc.), CrossFireX multi-GPU setups and, last but not least, triple-display ATI Eyefinity technology, which can be implemented via the built-in dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. Basically, the Vapor-X is meant to operate at low temperature, whereas the Toxic is supposed to cater to enthusiasts' need for intoxicating graphics and overclocking capabilities.
“Fitted with SAPPHIRE’s award winning Vapor-X cooler technology, the TOXIC Edition achieves its world-beating performance whilst working at lower operating temperatures and significantly more quietly than other solutions, and still giving enthusiasts headroom for further performance tuning,” the press release states.
Unfortunately, Sapphire has not yet made its latest two models available for shipment, but they have been put up for pre-order at prices of 425 Euro (Vapor-X) and 449 Euro (Toxic).