Introduction

Sapphire TOXIC X1950 XTX card and box

The Sapphire TOXIC X1950 XTX comes in two pieces, the card in red, and cooling unit in black/blue

Here is another shot of the card from above

For some end users, stock just isn’t good enough. “Stock” means compromises were made. These compromises could have been made to make the product cheaper to produce, or they could have been made to reduce performance. Perhaps it’s a combination of both, or it’s a case where the former compromise ends up affecting the later.

Whatever the reason, to hardware enthusiasts, stock just isn’t good enough.

You can place the liquid cooling unit anywhere in your case

This can be extremely frustrating to ATI enthusiasts who crave performance, as the high-end graphics cards these enthusiasts want like the X1900 XTX and X1950 XTX tend to strictly follow ATI’s reference board design to the letter. Often times, there’s very little innovation among ATI’s board partners on these cards, most of these boards are cut-and-paste copies of the ATI reference board. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, such as ASUS’ Extreme Radeon X1800 XT TOP, which was a highly overclocked X1800 XT graphics card equipped with blazing clock speeds and a massive heatsink/fan unit from Artic Cooling that was truly custom, but cards such as this are the exception more often than the rule.

The bottom line is that out-of-the-box, many ATI-based cards are flat-out boring.



Fortunately there are aftermarket cooling solutions from companies like Arctic Cooling, Thermaltake, and Zalman that are available for enthusiasts to purchase to deck out their ATI cards with. As Lenin showed you in our VGA Cooler Mini-Roundup, these coolers can do a pretty good job of cooling the X1900 XTX without generating an excessive amount of noise. Unfortunately however, the moment you swap out your stock ATI cooler with one of these aftermarket coolers you void your card’s original warranty, even though the aftermarket cooler does a better job of cooling the GPU than the stock ATI cooler.

You can place the liquid cooling unit anywhere in your case

The Sapphire TOXIC X1950 XTX and stock ATI X1950 XTX reference card

The X1950 cards and the GeForce 7900 GTX reference board

So what is an enthusiast to do if he wants a Radeon X1950 XTX board with more effective cooling but he doesn’t want to void his warranty? Up to this point, that answer has been pretty simple: pray for someone to produce a X1950 XTX card with better cooling.

7900 GTX and Sapphire TOXIC

The TOXIC and X1950 XTX pose with a Radeon x1900 XTX

Fortunately those prayers have been answered in the form of Sapphire’s TOXIC X1950 XTX. The card features a liquid cooling solution for cooling the graphics core, and supercharged clock speeds for even better than stock X1950 XTX performance.

Underside of the TOXIC cooling

Long hose connects the two components

We were eager to see how the board compared to the stock ATI Radeon X1950 XTX in terms of performance and cooling, so when the opportunity to test a card for review popped up, we jumped at the chance. Let’s take a closer look at the card…