Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition Review – the fastest HD6870 available?

The Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition arrives in a shiny, reflective box with a rendered ‘conjurer' taking centerstage. The box lists all the main specifications on the front.

There is no free game with this bundle, however the contents are comprehensive. It contains several power converter cables, vga adapter, a mini-displayport to displayport converter cable, Crossfire Connector, Software disc, Sapphire sticker and literature on the product as well as how to enter the Sapphire ‘Select Club'. We also like the inclusion of a quality 1.8 meter HDMI cable, as this will prove exceptionally useful to a wide audience.

The Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition ships with a custom Vapor-X cooler on an attractive blue PCB.

The fan design is also different when compared against the reference card. We have seen a similar fan design on the Sapphire HD6850, but it only had 9 blades – this card has 11 angular blades for improved airflow. The air is also forced across the cooler below in a wider array.

The Toxic HD6870 supports 2x mini DP (1.2), HDMI 1.4a, and 2 x DL-DVI and SL-DVI connectors. It requires two six pin power connectors for operation.

As would be expected, the cooler underneath is an excellent design. With a dual series of fat heatpipes running parallel along two sets of aluminum fins.

Sapphire have upgraded the PCB  and we will look later in the review at overclocking the card with voltage adjustments.

An overview of the card, as seen from GPUz. Core is overclocked to 970mhz and GDDR5 memory at 1150mhz (4600mhz effective) across a 256 bit memory interface.

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