Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 and 670, which has caused HD 7970's pricing to go down quite a bit.



Sapphire's HD 7970 Toxic 6 GB is a maxed out enthusiast class design of the HD 7970. It uses a large dual-fan cooler by Sapphire, paired with a custom-designed PCB and 6 GB of fast GDDR5 memory. Sapphire has also overclocked their card out of the box to frequencies of 1100 MHz GPU and 1500 MHz memory. You can use Sapphire's "Lethal Boost" button that is implemented using the dual-BIOS function, should you want to take the HD 7970 to even higher performance levels. With this BIOS, clocks are increased to 1200 MHz GPU and 1600 MHz memory.

In our Sapphire's HD 7970 Toxic 6 GB review we will test both the normal and the boost BIOS (results marked as "Sapphire HD 7970 Toxic Boost").

Pricing of the Sapphire HD 7970 Toxic 6 GB is certainly not low; the card retails around $700.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• 2x PCI-Express power cable
• CrossFire bridge
• HDMI cable
• Mini-DP to DP adapter
• Active single-link mini-DP to DVI adapter
• DVI adapter

The Card

Sapphire's card looks extremely powerful thanks to the large cooler and the backplate with its sporty stripe design.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two Mini DisplayPorts, one full-size HDMI port, and two dual-link DVI ports. You may use all outputs at the same time.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2, enabling the use of hubs and Multi-Stream Transport.


You may combine up to four HD 7970 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher frame rates or better image-quality settings.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.