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Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 04 July 2006 |
TrustedReviews shares a review on the Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe video card. While I was out at CeBIT, Sapphire was showing off a new liquid cooled Radeon X1900 XTX card and we've been itching to get hold of it ever since. Although some sites have checked engineering samples of this product, we were waiting for the finished version and it has finally arrived. I'm not one for commenting on packaging, as far as I'm concerned it could turn up in a brown box as long it's intact. However, I was rather impressed by this packaging. I have to admit, as packaging goes it is pretty nice and I'm going to reluctantly suggest that it adds to the overall product experience.
 Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
The card itself is ATI's flagship Radeon X1900 XTX. It has 48 pixel shader processors, 16 texture units, 8 vertex shaders and 16 pixel output engines. A normal XTX has a 650MHz core clock and 1550MHz effective memory speed, while this particular card has a slightly higher core speed of 675MHz and 1600MHz effective memory. That's a minor improvement and I don't expect it to make much difference, but we'll see. Clock speeds aside, what makes this card unique is its cooling solution. Instead of the reference air cooler that is noisy, Sapphire has chosen to use a self-contained liquid cooling kit.
The actual cooler is manufactured by Thermaltake and is exceedingly similar to the Tide Water cooling kit, except the fan seems to be slightly larger and spins a little faster. That kit alone is around £45, so I'm surprised that the asking price of £405 is only around £50 more than an air cooled version, and comes with higher clock speeds. Buying it all in one kit certainly saves a lot of fiddling around and also maintains your card's warranty. Some of you might be wondering how this affects CrossFire, and we've been told Sapphire will be releasing a limited number of CrossFire edition cards with this cooler fitted.
I also spent quite a while fiddling with overclocking this card. The memory was quite happy at 1784MHz which is a nice increase, while the core wasn't so easily persuaded. At points I had the core up to 730MHz but after playing games for even short periods it would eventually lock up at anything above the rated 675MHz. This is a little disappointing, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of overclocking entirely as it could well be that my particular card wasn't that forgiving. As expected, the improvement over a standard clocked X1900 XTX was minimal, with one or two frames per second.
If you are seriously considering buying a Radeon X1900 XTX, then it is well worth paying the extra money for this card as the noise reduction is dramatic. The extra performance is just an added bonus. However, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is simultaneously faster and quieter for the same money. The Radeon X1900 XTX on the other hand has the option of HDR and FSAA as well as the possibility of running in CrossFire, assuming you can get hold of a similarly cooled master card.
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