What's TOXIC about it?
Please head back to our in-depth architecture look if you need to familiarise yourself with what makes the technology tick along.
The TOXIC brand was first showcased with the Radeon X800-series of GPUs and is one of Sapphire's brand names for pre-overclocked cards with a twist. At that time of its inception, however, TOXIC was often associated with pre-attached watercooling, but subsequent editions have used the umbrella term for designs that eschew the reference design and employ a different cooler on top of a card that's armed with higher-than default speeds.
The obvious difference between this and the reference card is the binning of original heatsink/fan combination - one which caused some consternation by not modulating speeds correctly.
Sapphire's teamed up with ZALMAN and strapped one of its heatpipe-clad coolers on top. The larger fan brings promise of lower temperatures and higher potential overclocks as a result.
The semi-side-on shot shows the copper construction and heatpipes that make up the cooler. A whole bunch of fins are used to gain maximum cooling area, and the fan pushes the accumulated heat away, albeit to circle inside the chassis rather than exhausted out of the back.
The cooler is nicer than the reference card's in every respect, because its fan is quieter for both idle and load modes and, as noted, performs better with respect to temperatures. However, it doesn't appear to be thermostatically controlled, spinning, as it does, at the same kind of speed irrespective of temperatures. We'd recommend that a wider set of tolerances be set in the BIOS so that it's practically silent during idle periods.
