Sapphire Technology, one of the leading producers of graphics cards, has announced its latest high-end “Toxic” offering that is equipped with liquid cooling system. The new board is likely to have any right to be called the world’s fastest Radeon X1950 XTX card, as it comes with special software that overclocks the visual processing unit.

The new graphics card comes with Automatic Performance Enhancer – or APE – software that automatically overclocks graphics chip by 45MHz, from 650MHz to 695MHz. Unlike previously expected, the new board will not overclock GDDR4 memory from 2.0GHz, even though Sapphire claims that users will still be able to push the speed of memory higher using third-party tools.

Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX Toxic with liquid cooling system will come in typical and CrossFire Edition versions, which means that end users will be able to use two of such performance-enhanced graphics boards for maximum speed and image quality.

Earlier this year Sapphire released Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX graphics board with higher clock-speeds compared to reference-designed Radeon X1900 XTX. While the board truly offered slightly higher performance, it still had some drawbacks which included a cooling system that hardly had enough performance for further overclocking as well as some design peculiarities that oblige end-users to have a relatively big computer case with proper airflows inside.

Given that the Radeon X1950/X1900-series graphics processors do not have much overclocking potential beyond 650MHz clock-speed, it will be quite hard for Sapphire to push the frequency towards 700MHz, as the liquid cooler the company uses cannot boast with much higher efficiency compared to typical air-cooling. Besides, the new Toxic from Sapphire will hardly be able to offer quieter operation compared to the default Radeon X1950 XTX, which is nearly as silent, as a passively cooled graphics card.

Pricing of the Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX Toxic graphics boards may vary from country to country.