Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition Review – the fastest HD6870 available?

For the review today we have built a strong system which we feel would fit in well with the audience purchasing these cards. We are using a Core i7 950 Quad Core CPU with 6GB of DDR3 memory. We have applied a moderate overclock to the processor because we know you guys never run anything at reference speeds!

We are also going to limit testing to 1920×1080 (1080) and 1920×1200 as less than 1% of the enthusiast user base reading this will have a 30 inch screen – this will address the widest possible audience.

We will however dedicate a page to 3x monitor testing, for those of you lucky enough to have access to three 23/24 inch screens.

Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition (970/1150)

Other cards:
eVGA GTX460 FTW (850/1000)
nVidia GTX460 Talon Attack (810/975)
AMD Reference HD6870 (900/1050)
AMD Reference HD6850 (775/1000)
AMD Reference HD5870 (850/1200)
AMD Reference HD5850 (725/1000)
AMD Reference HD5770 (850/1200)
nVidia Reference GTX460 (675/900)
eVGA GTX460 768MB SC (763/950)
nVidia Reference GTX 460 768MB (675/900)
XFX HD5830 XXX (840/1125)
nVidia Reference GTS 450 (850/1000)
XFX HD5750 XXX (740/1200)
AMD reference HD5750 (700/1150)

Other Hardware:
Processor: Intel Core i7 950 @ 3.6ghz
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Motherboard: ASRock X58 Extreme 6
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz 6GB (3x2GB)
Power Supply: Thermaltake 750W Toughpower Grand
Chassis: Cooler Master CM 690 II
Camera: Nikon D300S SLR
Optical: Asus BluRay Player
Camera: Nikon D300S with R1C1

Monitors: Dell Ultrasharp U2410 (A00)
Iiyama ProLite E2472HDD x2

Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
HQV Benchmark
Catalyst 11.1 Driver
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra
Cyberlink Media Espresso
Forceware 266.58 WHQL

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter

Games:
Resident Evil 5
Lost Planet 2
Far Cry 2
Tom Clancy H.A.W.X.
Metro 2033
Alien V Predator
Mafia 2
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

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