Sapphire R9 270X Toxic Edition OC Review

The Sapphire R9 270X Toxic Edition OC arrives in a gold coloured box featuring a robot on the front.

Inside the peripherals box is a quick start guide, a driver/software disc, an HDMI cable, as well as some video and power converter cables and a Crossfire connector.

The Sapphire solution is a heavy two slot card which is very dramatically styled. The cooler comprises a central gold/yellow fan contrasting against the two black fans on either side. On the rear of the card is a two tone backplate to enhance cooling performance and to reduce the risks of damage.

The Sapphire R9 270X Toxic Edition takes power from two six pin PCI power connectors. Same as the reference design.

It is Crossfire capable in a 2, 3 way configuration. Next to the Crossfire connector is a Sapphire button. On this particular card this just switches between compatiblility with UEFI and non UEFI systems.

The I/O plate has a DVI-I and DVI-D connector, alongside a full sized HDMI and DisplayPort.

It is widely known that AMD Radeon HD 7xxx parts (and earlier) currently can support a maximum of 2 HDMI/DVI displays, and the rest must be DisplayPort connections (or active DisplayPort adapters).

AMD Radeon R9 Series can now support up to three HDMI/DVI displays for use with AMD Eyefinity technology. A set of displays which support identical timings is required to enable this feature. The display clocks and timing for this feature are configured at boot time. As such, display hot‐plugging is not supported for the third HDMI/DVI connection.

A reboot is required to enable three HDMI/DVI displays.DisplayPort outputs are supported in addition to the three HDMI/DVI displays (up to 6 in total).

The new Tri-X cooler is fantastic. It is built around 3 massive 10mm heatpipes which get direct cooling from the three large fans above. This particular card uses a 10 phase power delivery system and high quality black diamond chokes for maximum stability under load.

AMD's R270X is built on the 28nm process. The core on this Sapphire board is clocked 100mhz higher than the reference design at 1,150mhz and it has 32 ROPs, 80 TMU’s and 1,280 Stream Processors. The 2GB of GDDR5 is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. The memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective) which is 100mhz higher than the reference board (1,400mhz or 5.6Gbps effective).

This high overclock should translate into a considerable performance boost over the reference card.

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