X-bit labs

Radeon without Antidote: Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX Review

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov , Alexey Stepin

[ 04/27/2006 | 04:15 PM ]

The winter, which brought us quite a lot of new products from ATI, such as the Radeon X1900 and the CrossFire Xpress 3200, is over, but there is one final blizzard coming to a retail outlet near you: the Sapphire’s Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX. The graphics card that features liquid-cooling and increased clock-speeds promises silent operation amid extreme performance. We decided to take a look at this product!

Table of contents:

• The Way of Toxic Blizzard
  
• Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Design
  
• Liquid-Cooling for Dummies: Taking the Radeon X1900 XTX to the Limits?
  
• Noise, 2D Quality
  
• Overclocking, Power Consumption
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2
  
• The Chronicles of Riddick
  
• Call of Duty
  
• Doom 3
  
• Far Cry
  
• F.E.A.R.
  
• Half-Life 2
  
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
  
• Project: Snowblind
  
• Quake 4
  
• Serious Sam 2
  
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• Pacific Fighters
  
• X3: Reunion
  
• Performance in Strategy Games
  
• Age of Empires 3
  
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War
  
• Performance in Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Aquamark3
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
  
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 120
  
• Conclusion
  

Sapphire Technologies was originally a part of PC Partner, a huge holding from Hong Kong, China, but back in 2002, the company obtained its brand name along with very experienced personnel from ATI Technologies and started to penetrate the retail market of graphics cards.

Having production capacity of 1.8 million boards per month, Sapphire became the main add-in-card partner of ATI from the very beginning.

Being the No. 1 manufacturing ally of ATI Technologies is a honour, but not an easy task. Sapphire has to offer the full range of Radeon products from the world’s largest supplier of discrete graphics processors, something which obliges the company to make even not the most interesting products. Nevertheless, priveleges that Sapphire has allow the company to offer very advanced add-in cards too, something that allows Sapphire to differentiate itself from the other companies.

For years now Sapphire has been offering its Ultimate (see our review called SAPPHIRE RADEON 9800 XT ULTIMATE Edition Extreme Overclocking: Myths and Reality) and Toxic graphics cards, the former with some kind of advanced and silent cooling system, the latter with factory overclocking. In May, 2005, the company decided to add another cathegory of products: the Blizzard graphics card, which should be the absolutely the top offering of Sapphire.

Unfortunately, at the request of Blizzard entertainment the company had to scrap the Blizzard brand and use its Toxic trade-mark for its premium class product.