Final thoughts and rating

AMD has had to respond to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti and appears to have done so in the form of a 1GB Radeon HD 6950. Sapphire, meanwhile, has served up its own alternative in the form of the massively pre-overclocked Radeon HD 6870 TOXIC.

Launched as one of the fastest Radeon HD 6870s available, the card represents the very best of AMD's mid-to-high-end architecture and is shaping up to be an excellent solution should Sapphire be able to meet the proposed £200 price tag.

If you like the cut of NVIDIA's jib, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti offers similar performance at a similar price, but for those who prefer the flavour of AMD's ingredients - including the likes of Eyefinity and EyeSpeed - Sapphire's HD 6870 TOXIC is well worthy of consideration.

The performance, mixed with the excellent cooling capability of the Vapor-X cooler, makes it a hugely attractive package. If there's a catch, it's that the HD 6870 TOXIC unexpectedly finds itself going up against the £210 Radeon HD 6950 1GB. Stay tuned for our review of that.

The Good

Incredible out-the-box speed for a HD 6870
Vapor-X cooler excels at keeping temperatures in check
Stands up to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Bundle includes HDMI cable

The Bad

Cooler can become noisy under extreme load

HEXUS Rating

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 TOXIC

HEXUS Awards

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 TOXIC

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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The Sapphire HD 6870 Toxic seems to be a decent card. I don't like loud video cards but I don't regularly run Furmark :) Now if they can keep the price down!

Factory overclocked card make little sense unless they are significantly cheaper than the non-overclocked card above it. If the price difference is small why would anyone choose a ‘super over clock edition’ on the limits of it's performance to one with stock clocks and headroom. If they sold this card at stock clocks with the upgraded cooling for a small premium then I would consider it. I've always liked the vapour-x and toxic cards but never bought one and by the pricing decision (OC = profit) probably never will.

Resounding “meh” for all of these overclocked factory cards tbh. You have to wonder would we really be missing anything had no cards been released from either AMD or nVidia in the past 3-4 months? I doubt it.

Deleted
Resounding “meh” for all of these overclocked factory cards tbh. You have to wonder would we really be missing anything had no cards been released from either AMD or nVidia in the past 3-4 months? I doubt it.

Apart from the GTX 560, 570 and 580 and the 6950 and 6970?
Yeah you're right, apart from them there's nothing interesting :P

I included those cards. The 570 and 580 are just Fermi not done badly, and Cayman was interesting only because it was a new arch. Performance and feature wise, they are all yawners and it's about to be capped by silly double-chip solutions from both teams.

Just roll on 28nm.