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Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Sunday, 30 April 2006 |
X-Bit Labs reports about a
review on the Sapphire Toxic
X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe graphics card. The winter, which brought us quite a lot
of new products from ATI, such as
the Radeon X1900 and the CrossFire Xpress 3200, is over, but there is one final
blizzard coming to a retail outlet near you, the Sapphire's Toxic X1900 XTX.
The graphics card that features liquid-cooling and increased clock speeds
promises silent operation amid extreme performance. For years now Sapphire has been offering
its Ultimate and Toxic graphics cards, the former with some kind of advanced and
silent cooling system, the latter with factory overclocking.
 Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
The Toxic version of the Radeon X1900 XTX looks just the same as all the other Radeon X1900 XTX based graphics cards on the market, except, of course, the cooling system. Hence, you should expect Blizzard to feature the same memory chips from Samsung with 1.1ns access time and maximum clock speed of 1800MHz. Sapphire's Toxic X1900 XTX with liquid-cooling is currently the fastest Radeon based graphics card on the market. However, it is not only a fast board with water cooling and with all the advantages and disadvantages of the Radeon X1900 XTX family.
But this is the top-of-the-range offering from Sapphire and it should be considered as such. The main advantages of the Toxic X1900 XTX with liquid-cooling compared to the rivaling solutions, primarily from the GeForce 7900 camp, is 48 pixel shader processors, which may become important for future games full of mathematically intensive pixel shaders, support for HDR + antialiasing, a bit better performance in modes with 4x full-scene antialiasing and so on. The key benefits that the Sapphire's product has over its brethren among the Radeon X1900 series is generally quieter cooling solution and increased clock speeds.
Yet another advantage of the Toxic X1900 XTX is exceptional product bundle, it includes everything needed and a selection of games that users can choose themselves. We would be even more pleased if Sapphire supplied a special set of accessories with its premium boards, however. The premium offering from Sapphire is definitely a nice product, but not without some drawbacks which include a cooling system that hardly has enough performance for overclocking near the extreme levels, some design peculiarities that oblige end-users to have a relatively big computer case with proper airflows inside.
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