Thoughts

Sapphire shipped the TOXIC Radeon X1900 XTX at the end of April ('06) at a price of just over £450 inc dreaded VAT. The question then becomes, "is it worth paying just under £100 for a watercooled version of the XTX?". It does enhance the appeal of the SKU significantly, bringing one of the poor facets of the reference design up to modern standards.

It also enables, on the review sample at least, a decent level of overclocking at the Low fan setting, giving you levels of performance to best ASUS's TOP version without a massive chunk of the noise. While it's hard to recommend a near £100 cooling solution on an already expensive SKU, the TOXIC does the job, there's no difficulty installing since it's assembled and pre-plumbed in for you, and it doesn't occupy any more space in your PC than the standard hardware.

So if you can stretch to a TOXIC-cooled Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX, while still a touch expensive, you'll certainly appreciate what it brings to the table. A niche product, yes, but a well executed one for the target audience. Recommended for those folks.

HEXUS Awards

Sapphire TOXIC Radeon X1900 XTX

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So to buy one also means contemplating changing it for something else. Bar Arctic Cooling's Accelero X2, there's nothing really out there that's solely air-cooled and capable of dealing with the heat of something like an X1900 XT or XTX, without making a racket.

what about the vf900?