by Anton Shilov
10/10/2006 | 11:58 PM
Sapphire Technology has quietly introduced its new liquid-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX graphics board among certain media sources. The new board will use the same cooler as previously release Toxic X1900 XTX and will also feature higher clock-speeds, just like the predecessor.
<%BANNER[article]%>Sapphire Toxic X1950 XTX is expected to be available in both CrossFire Edition and typical versions in order to fulfill the demand for multi-GPU systems. The new boards will clock the chip at higher than 650MHz, whereas the GDDR4 memory will operate at over 2000MHz, making the new Toxic X1950 XTX the fastest ATI Radeon X1950 XTX-based graphics card available.
Currently no final clock-speeds are set, however, sources close to the company believe that Sapphire will make its best to ensure that the new board is faster than the rivals.
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.