Final thoughts and rating
AMD/ATI and its partners clearly know that NVIDIA is set to launch the GeForce GTX 480/470 GPUs this week. The likes of Sapphire and XFX would be remiss in thinking that NVIDIA's finest single-GPU card is going to be slow. Depending who you believe right now, GTX 480 will be 10 to 40 per cent faster than Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB, depending upon gaming title and settings.Taking those numbers are face value for a moment, Sapphire will look to fend off GeForce GTX 480 in absolute terms with the twin-GPU Radeon HD 5970 that currently etails for £550. But the company is not giving up the single-GPU crown without a fight, and it will be bringing a super-clocked Radeon HD 5870 2,048MB card to market under the TOXIC branding.
Clocking in a 925MHz core and 5,000MHz memory, higher than any other air-cooled HD 5870 at the time of writing, Sapphire's card benefits from the excellent Vapor-X (VCT) cooler and, at times, from the double-sized frame-buffer. We expect Sapphire to charge customers £375 for the privilege of owning the fastest single-GPU Radeon going.
Is it worth it? The very limited headroom in the HD 5870 GPU makes most special-edition cards relatively pointless in pure performance terms. However, taking the better-than-average cooler and 2GB buffer into account, the asking price isn't extortionate.
What we'd really like to see from Sapphire is an Eyefinity6 card based on the same GPU, which would maximise the card's abilities, but until then, this is the fastest 'standard' single-GPU card around...for a couple of days, at least.
The good
Highest clock-speed we've seen thus far for a Radeon HD 5870
Excellent cooler; quiet under load
Fastest single-GPU graphics card (for a short while)
The not so good
Front-mounted power connectors may cause fitting issues in some cases
2,048MB frame-buffer is only really useful in isolated gaming cases
HEXUS Rating
Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB
HEXUS Awards
Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC
HEXUS Right2Reply
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