AMD's partners are out in full force to try and take the attention away from the impending launch of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 next week. The latest entrant is Sapphire, which has a pair of new Radeon HD 6870s and an intriguing take on the HD 6970.
First up, the HD 6870 is getting the Vapor-X treatment. The card will be strapped to the company's custom vapour-chamber cooler, which should keep the GPU running nice and cool. Combined with the custom PCB, a 10-phase power control and Sapphire's custom Black Diamond chokes, the board should have plenty of headroom for overclocking.
Of course, the standard Vapor-X card will only ship with the default 900MHz core and 4,200MHz memory clocks, so you'll have to do all of the overclocking yourself. On the upside, the card ships with Sapphire's Trixx software, which should make tweaking a little easier.
For those who would rather let the pros take care of the tuning, the TOXIC version will feature the same board and cooler, but will turn the frequencies up to 970MHz and 4,600MHz for the 1,120 stream processors and the memory, respectively.
But these aren't the only custom cards that Sapphire has ready - the manufacturer is also preparing a rather odd take on the HD 6970. Although the cooler looks pretty similar to the reference design, it appears to have some sort of turn-key mechanism built into it.
Exactly what this is for is anyone's guess, although it could be used for 'one touch' overclocking or to engage the second BIOS. Either way, it doesn't look particularly easy to get to - especially in a CrossFire configuration - but we're sure Sapphire has something interesting planned. Unfortunately, there aren't any details on exactly what that might be.
So far, there isn't any information on when these cards might be released or how much they'll cost.
