Sapphire Technologies, the world’s largest maker of ATI Radeon-based graphics cards, announced Thursday that it would rename its premium graphics card earlier known as “Blizzard” that featured liquid-cooled Radeon X1900 XTX graphics processors following a demand made by Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of StarCraft and WarCraft games.

The liquid-cooled Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX announced at CeBIT 2006 will now be called Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX, but will maintain blue packaging and technical specifications. Only the brand-name will change, according to Sapphire, as Blizzard is a registered trade mark of Blizzard Entertainment game developer.

The retail versions of the Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX will be clocked at 675MHz for the GPU and 1600MHz for the memory, up 25MHz and 50MHz compared to reference clocks of the chip and memory respectively. While the frequency increase is not very significant, it allows Sapphire to declare the world’s fastest Radeon X1900 XTX and also demonstrate the efficiency of the Toxic’s liquid cooling system. Users will be able to further overclock the part.

Recommended pricing for the Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX is $599.

The Radeon X1900 graphics chip, also known under code-name R580, features 48 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader processors, 16 texture units, enlarged by 50% hierarchical Z-buffer (HyperZ buffer), higher amount of general purpose register arrays as well as Fetch4 feature designed to accelerate lookup of textures consisting of one component by the factor of four. The new chip naturally utilizes ATI’s ring-bus memory controller as well as other improvements found in the Radeon X1000 family.