Sapphire TOXIC HD 7970 GHz Edition Pro Reviews

One Toxic HD 7970 GHz Edition card can drive three or four monitors in a multi-display setup. A second board is almost assuredly needed for higher resolutions, making the 6 GB of on-board memory difficult to utilize. Professionals working in oil/gas applications are more likely to need lots of graphics memory, but they're using FirePro or Quadro cards. More purpose-built solutions exist for large video walls, which generally don't require enthusiast-class 3D performance. All of that makes Sapphire's Toxic HD 7970 GHz Edition an answer in search of a problem. We can’t think of a usage scenario for which we’d recommend it. If you really dig the effort Sapphire put into its Vapor-X cooling solution, we recommend you check out the Vapor-X HD 7970 GHz Edition 3 GB card, and use the difference to take your better half out to a nice dinner.

Sapphire's HD 7970 Toxic is like a Lamborghini. It's expensive, not very efficient, and noisy. Unfortunately, noisy computer components don't impress people nearly as much as noisy cars, and a fast graphics card doesn't get you girls either. Thanks to a massive overclock out of the box, the HD 7970 Toxic delivers outstanding performance results for a HD 7970. In our testing, the card ends up 11% faster than the HD 7970 reference design, 3% faster than the HD 7970 GHz Edition and 4% faster than GTX 680. If that's not enough for you, you can use the card's dual-BIOS feature to switch to an extreme BIOS called "Lethal Boost", increasing clocks and voltages even further. The Lethal Boost BIOS provides an extra 5% performance boost on top of the card's already very good performance, making the card faster than any single-GPU card we ever tested. Sapphire has equipped their card with 6 GB of GDDR5 memory. This might look nice on paper, but we don't see any performance advantage as a result of 6 GB of memory in all of our testing. We recently tested a 4 GB GTX 680 and did some memory consumption testing, which showed that, even on a triple-30" monitor setup, the maximum memory usage does not exceed 3 GB, so buying a card with 6 GB of memory seems unnecessary.

Sapphire has upped the graphics-card ante with the Radeon HD 7970 TOXIC 6GB. Featuring a new GHz Edition core at its base, a custom PCB, and overvolted and overclocked straight out of the factory, cooled by a monstrous heatsink, and featuring the highest frequencies we've seen thus far from a Radeon-class GPU, there's a lot for the enthusiast to get their teeth into. A quick press of the 'Lethal Boost' button provides 1,200MHz core and 6,400MHz clocks that are enough, on balance, to make it the fastest single-GPU card in our line-up. It makes for a nice debate whether the TOXIC is the speediest single-GPU card in the world - there are a few partner-overclocked GTX 680s that might take umbrage to that statement - but Sapphire's Beastie is in with a good shout. The 6GB framebuffer, meanwhile, doesn't tell in our standard games and tested resolutions, so we'll quickly revisit the topic with multi-monitor testing.

Our original look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 TOXIC 6GB video card determined that, on balance, it is the fastest single-GPU card we've tested. Equipped with the highest frequencies yet seen on a Radeon HD 7970, made possible by the 'Lethal Boost' button and GHz Edition GPU heritage, Sapphire also takes the opportunity of laying down 6GB of GDDR5 memory on the beast. Huge rendering power and a silly-sized memory framebuffer sound like a perfect fit for users looking to game on three full-HD screens under AMD's Eyefinity multi-monitor technology. Sapphire sensibly includes the requisite adapter - active miniDP-to-DVI - for easy-as-pie connectivity, too. Armed with six games, three screens, and top-end image-quality settings, the TOXIC remains the best of our high-end trio, though even it doesn't have the pixel chutzpah to run the latest titles at silky-smooth framerates. Examination of the per-second and per-frame times indicates that the TOXIC's performance lead over a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is more down to elevated clocks than jumbo framebuffer considerations, and we feel that gaming situations would need to be artificially manufactured to show the real-world worth of an extra 3GB of card memory; heck, the GeForce GTX 680 does well enough with 'only' 2GB.

All I can say is that Sapphire hit this one out of the park, to use a baseball analogy. The HD 7970 6GB Toxic Edition delivers best in class performance against other HD 7900 series cards in part by way of the incredible clock speeds both stock and overclocked. Clock speeds of greater than 1200MHz on the core and 1600MHz on the memory are not going to be possible without having a good base to start with. Sapphire has the baseline covered with a custom 12 layer PCB and its Lethal power suite design. This design uses an eight phase power delivery system for the GPU core voltage with a separate phase for the VRAM and controller for a good stable flow of current to the card. Additionally, double sided Black Diamond chokes and DirectFET technology are used to reduce the operating temperatures for the power circuits by upwards of 40%. Cooling the HD 7970 6GB Toxic edition is an all new Vapor-X cooling solution that keeps the 28nm core and the 6GB of onboard memory cool to deliver rock solid performance. Using a four heat pipe design with the cooling solution keeps the card cool at both stock and overclocked settings. When the fan is pushed to 90% the GPU core stays at 54 °C during my overclocked testing; that is overclocked and over volted. At 90% the noise generated by the fans is audible but not so much so that it borders on annoying. The fans used are 90mm in size and use an aerofoil design to improve airflow and manage noise characteristics. Fans slowing down and dying have killed many a video card without the owner even knowing what went south until it is to late. To combat this the fans used on the Toxic Edition have fans that use a dust reeling design to improve fan longevity. It's a small thing but well worth mentioning.