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Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Saturday, 27 May 2006 |
Coming from t-break is a review on the Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe graphics card. Generally, water cooling has been associated with enthusiasts and hard core overclockers, however, this perception has been changing over the last year or so. Companies like Gigabyte and Thermaltake have ready made water cooling kits that don't require much skill installing. While these kits don't necessarily work as well as something put together by the enthusiast, they do get the job done. Today, we're looking at such a solution, namely the Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card which comes water cooled out of the box.
 Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
The water cooling kit is specifically designed by Thermaltake for Sapphire and uses a fill copper block for cooling the GPU. Sapphire takes advantage of the water cooling by having this card overclocked out of the box. While the standard speeds for the Radeon X1900 XTX are 650MHz core and 1500MHz memory, this one is clocked at 675MHz/1600MHz.In general, the Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX is about 4-6% faster than the stock Radeon X1900 XTX partly because of newer drivers however, mostly because of the slightly overclocked speeds of this card.
Now since this card is already overclocked out of the box, we weren't expecting much success with further overclocking and we were kinda right. The best we could get out of this Sapphire card was 695MHz core and 1640MHz on the memory. The main reason enthusiasts chose water is to cool the temperatures produced by their components so they can overclock better. In our tests, the reference ATI card with its stock HSF unit was idling at about 51°C. The Sapphire Toxic card showed much better temperatures, 40°C at idle which is also something we get using a Mace4 high-end water cooling setup.
Even temperatures under load were reasonably low with the Toxic card. Where the ATI default HSF unit posted temperatures around 85°C, the Toxic solution managed to cool that by over 20°C and posting at 63°C. The Mace4 on the other hand produces even lower temperatures, a good 15°C lower than the Sapphire under load right around 50°C. The second reason someone choses water cooling is to reduce the noise produced by their components and we must say that the faster fan speed option on the Toxic is a bit noisy. As per specifications from Sapphire, at 2500RPM.
The fan produces 25dBA which is certainly lower than the noise level produced by the stock HSF unit by ATI, but is still quite a far cry from being silent. Ideally, the fan should've automatically changed speeds when needed instead of rotating at the same speed all the time. Price wise, the water cooled Toxic card should cost you about $30-40 more than Sapphire's non water cooled card and we think its worth to spend a little extra to get a slightly faster and reasonably cooler and and quiter card, if you're not a hardcore enthusiast. It's not something that'll replace a Mace4 but its good enough for the beginner.
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