The Radeon HD 5970 Toxic card from Sapphire has got a bit more coverage than usual when it comes to looking at a video card, the main reason for this is that not only are there limited amounts of the model around the world, but also it's the world's fastest video card thanks to some insane stock clocks on the model. Today we're back with the model and what we want to find out from the model is if we can overclock past what it's already very high default clocks are set at. The fact that we are writing this article means we could get a bit of extra power from the model, otherwise we wouldn't be wasting any time here. The question is, how far did we actually get and did we somehow break a record? - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 Toxic Overclocked Review

The main thing we wanted to see was a 1GHz core clock on the card. We figured we needed to play around with the voltage a little to get that. At the same time we wanted to see if we could get anything more out of the mammoth 4GB of GDDR5 memory. When it comes to overclocking, much to most manufacturers horror there is only one option, being MSI AfterBurner. The fact that MSI let you use the program on cards from all companies means that anyone overclocking is probably using it. Out of the box the Radeon HD 5970 Toxic from Sapphire is giving us a core clock of 900MHz, so a little extra voltage should do the trick.

The Radeon HD 5970 Toxic 4GB edition is just a sick board as it is. You can see that the performance on offer from it at the stock speed is already disturbing. You don't even have to get us started on the potential when overclocked. And to be honest, looking at the core clock it's clear we've got more room, we just need to get around the 1000MHz limitation that is on offer. Some say that it can be done via the BIOS, but we don't have loads of information. We are talking to Sapphire and hopefully we will be able to get around it soon enough. But even at 1000MHz on the two cores, the performance is just insane.

Looking at our benchmark results, you can see the massive boost this model offers compared to other ones on the market in stock and overclock form. The Radeon HD 5970 Toxic is a very special board, there is no doubt it's going to be out of reach for most people as we're sure it's going to carry a high price. It's not going to change the fact that you'll love to own one though. We're sure Sapphire would love to know that their fastest video card in the world was made faster with Sapphire software and not MSI. We personally don't care, though we use what's best and what's going to give us the biggest performance gains.

There's really no reason to overclock the Radeon HD 5970 Toxic, it doesn't need it. For the most part the standard Radeon HD 5970 doesn't even need it, but we overclock because we just can. In fact, you can see today there's some massive performance to be had from the Radeon HD 5970 Toxic and there's no denying that NVIDIA have a very tough battle to take on ATI. The competition is going to make for some of the best video cards to date, we feel over the next few years.