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Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 09 May 2006 |
Hexus shows us a review on the
Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX
512MB PCIe graphics card. The reference cooler ATI equipped their Radeon X1800 XT and Radeon X1900 XT/XTX
with is effective, there's no doubting that. Cools the chip well, actively cools
the memory; job is indeed a good'un, as they say. Shame it's the sonic
equivalent of a punch in the face, then. Almost 100% of the criticism of ATI's latest high-end Radeon's
revolves around the cooler. You can't really fault performance, image quality is
class-leading and having one in your PC means you're a discerning purchaser
of potent pixel pushers. But I bet you don't like the cooler. So to buy one also
means contemplating changing it for something else.
 Sapphire
Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
Bar Arctic Cooling's Accelero X2, there's nothing really out there that's solely air cooled and capable of dealing with the heat of something like a Radeon X1900 XT or XTX, without making a racket. Don't fancy an Accelero X2 much? Sapphire hear you. They've decided to cater for the high-end Radeon X1K owner by moving the game on a touch with a liquid-cooled replacement. Enter the Toxic, the company's pre-plumbed cooler replacement for those with working ears. Now before we start, let us point out that the sample we tested differs from final production versions in a couple of ways.
Firstly Sapphire will change the backplane plate on the graphics card for a single slot version. There's no need for it to be dual slot as you'll see in our pictures, and Sapphire know that. Secondly, Sapphire have upped the out-of-the-box clocks for the Toxic X1900 XTX from stock to 675/1600MHz, equating to a 25MHz boost on memory and core. The Toxic cooler is an almost complete replacment for the standard one with only the retention bracket on the rear kept. The block comes preattached to the card and pre-plumbed to the all-in-one, pump and heat exchanger combo.
Sapphire shipped the Toxic X1900 XTX at the end of April at a price of just over £450. The question then becomes, is it worth paying just under £100 for a watercooled version? It does enhance the appeal of the SKU significantly, bringing one of the poor facets of the reference design up to modern standards. It also enables, on the review sample at least, a decent level of overclocking at the Low fan setting, giving you levels of performance to best ASUS's TOP version without a massive chunk of the noise. While it's hard to recommend a near £100 cooling solution on an already expensive SKU, the Toxic does the job.
There's no difficulty installing since it's assembled and pre-plumbed in for you, and it doesn't occupy any more space in your PC than the standard hardware. So if you can stretch to a Toxic cooled Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX, while still a touch expensive, you'll certainly appreciate what it brings to the table. A niche product, yes, but a well executed one for the target audience. Recommended for those folks.
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