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Sapphire TOXIC X700 PRO Review February 02, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Looking for a mainstream card that performs well yet runs virtually silent? If so, then you may want to check out Sapphire's TOXIC X700 PRO. The card is based on ATI's proven RADEON X700 PRO and sports an exotic graphics cooler. But that's not all, via Sapphire's A.P.E. utility, the card can be automatically overclocked to speeds approaching ATI's now defunct RADEON X700 XT. See how this board performs in comparison to the competition in this review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 20 ) |
These cards owe a great deal of their success to TSMC’s 0.11-micron manufacturing process. By moving from 0.13-micron down to the smaller 0.11-micron process, ATI is able to affordably double the number of pixel pipelines in a mainstream offering from the four pipelines found in the RADEON 9600 family to eight in RADEON X700.
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This change has a dramatic effect on fill rate: RADEON 9600 XT features a 500MHz, 4-pixel pipeline core boasting a fill rate of 2.0 Gigatexels/second. In comparison, RADEON X700 PRO is clocked slightly slower, 420MHz, yet thanks to its eight pipeline architecture it possesses a higher fill rate of 3.36 Gigatexels/second. ATI improves performance even further by adding six vertex shading units; this is triple the amount found in the RADEON 9600 family.
ATI is able to pull this off while maintaining high clock speeds. The X700 PRO’s 420MHz core clock is 8MHz higher than RADEON 9800 XT’s 412MHz core. This gives the X700 PRO a fill rate advantage over all of ATI’s high-end DX9 offerings from 2002-2003. In fact, in our Sapphire Hybrid RADEON X700 PRO review, we found multiple cases where the Hybrid X700 PRO card was faster than RADEON 9800 PRO, and was even capable of challenging the RADEON 9800 XT in some circumstances, including DOOM 3’s high quality mode with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled.
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The bottom line is that the new manufacturing process helps to bring one key feature found in high-end cards (8 pixel pipeline architectures) down to the mainstream level more affordably than if TSMC’s larger 0.13-micron process had been used: keep in mind that not only is 0.11-micron a smaller process, allowing ATI to yield more chips per silicon wafer, it’s also a cheaper manufacturing option for ATI as TSMC’s 0.11-micron process doesn’t contain features that are more costly to implement such as low-k dielectric. The new process is able to do this, yet still maintain high clock speeds, as evidenced by the RADEON X700 PRO’s high clock speed of 420MHz.
With their TOXIC X700 PRO, Sapphire takes this platform and builds on it with better cooling. This, in turn, allows Sapphire to clock their board higher than other X700 PRO manufacturers…
| Last minute lineup changes | Page:: ( 2 / 20 ) |
The X800/X800 XL factor
Originally these two cards were intended to retail for $349 and $249 respectively, but at the last minute ATI reduced the price on both these boards by $49. This change had huge ramifications on the hardware industry, as the 12-pipeline RADEON X800 now hit the extremely popular $200 price point, while the X800 XL was priced at $300. Never before had such powerful cards been priced so low. With one fell swoop, ATI had essentially made the RADEON X700 XT and RADEON X800 SE obsolete, and had put incredible pricing pressure on 256MB RADEON X700 PRO cards, as it shared the same manufacturer’s suggested retail price as the RADEON X800 at $200.
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This put card manufacturers like Sapphire in a bind, especially if they wanted to produce a high-end X700 PRO SKU to fill out their X700 lineup. With only 8 pipelines and a 128-bit memory interface, a 256MB X700 PRO doesn’t stand a chance against the 12-pipe RADEON X800, yet they’re priced so similarly. Retailers and distributors with supplies of 256MB RADEON X700 PRO were also caught off guard by this move.
Of course, if you’ve tried to purchase a RADEON X800 recently, you know by now that these cards are still impossible to find at retail, as once again ATI has horribly miscalculated availability of their boards. This has given board partners and retailers more time to clear supplies of 256MB RADEON X700 PRO cards, but at the same time has likely prevented a few potential sales as consumers wait for the newer X800 parts.
So how does all this tie in with Sapphire’s TOXIC X700 PRO? Simple, it all comes down to board production costs.
128MB of memory
With all the extra features Sapphire includes on their TOXIC cards (which we’ll discuss on the next page), production costs for the TOXIC X700 PRO are higher than on one of their typical Hybrid X700 PRO cards like the one we reviewed back in October. In order to keep the final retail price competitive, Sapphire had to axe something. In this case, Sapphire chose to save a little by reducing the total amount of memory on the TOXIC X700 PRO, slashing it in half from 256MB, down to 128MB.
This comes as an interesting move to us, as we’ve seen cases with high-end cards that clearly take advantage of the extra memory. Half-Life 2 is the most prominent example, as well as Call of Duty with image quality settings cranked up to their maximums with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled. Our guess is that Sapphire must have felt that the X700 PRO VPU isn’t capable of pushing the extra memory, or if it does take advantage of it, it’s only at the higher resolutions where the X700 PRO lacks the memory bandwidth to provide playable frame rates. Thus it isn’t a big deal if the TOXIC X700 PRO only ships with 128MB of memory. We’ll see if that theory holds up in the performance results, but now let’s take a look at the TOXIC board itself.
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 3 / 20 ) |
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The Sapphire TOXIC X700 PRO begins life just like a normal Sapphire HYBRID X700 PRO board. You’ve got the same distinctive aqua blue PCB that has become Sapphire’s trademark, as well as the same board layout. Board circuitry and component selection is largely unchanged. Sapphire also includes RAMsinks on the TOXIC X700 PRO’s GDDR3 memory, just like the Hybrid X700 PRO. These small heatsinks are composed of aluminum, and do a good job of keeping the board’s memory cool.
The TOXIC board’s most distinctive feature is its massive VPU cooler, Sapphire refers to it as “Lethal” cooling. This cooler, manufactured by Arctic Cooling under their “VGA Silencer” line is massive, encompassing the entire X700 PRO board and then some, as the fan extends an additional two inches beyond the edge of the board. The cooler is also quite tall, and will occupy the entire PCI slot beneath the Sapphire TOXIC graphics card, just like a two-slot GeForce 6800 Ultra.
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Arctic Cooling starts with a copper base plate, which is responsible for drawing heat off of the X700 PRO VPU. This heat is then transferred to the aluminum heatsink, which is soldered directly to the copper base plate. The heatsink is composed of multiple long, tall fins allowing it to absorb more heat.
Paired alongside the heatsink is an equally daunting blue fan. The fan consists of eleven plastic blades and is quite large. By using a larger fan design, the fan itself can spin at lower RPMs, resulting in less noise than a smaller fan like you’d see on most graphics cards, which must spin at higher RPMs in order to be effective. The fan is encircled by a large plastic shroud. The shroud acts as a channel, helping the fan draw in more air. This air is then passed across the aluminum heatsink, and then directed outside the system case.
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As a result, this system effectively lowers the temperature within your case, as the heat generated from one of the system’s hottest components (the graphics card’s core) is carried directly outside of the case.
In operation, the fan is practically silent, you literally have to place your ear directly next to the card’s fan in order to hear anything, and even then the fan is barely audible!
Automated Performance Enhancement
Besides the TOXIC X700 PRO’s Lethal Cooling, the second most distinctive feature this card supports is known as A.P.E. which is short for automated performance enhancement. APE works by overclocking your X700 PRO graphics card.
Since ATI won’t let their board partners overclock their cards by default out-of-the-box, Sapphire provides A.P.E. on the TOXIC X700 PRO’s driver CD. Simply pop the CD in your CD-ROM drive, click on Automated Performance Enhancement, and voila, your TOXIC X700 PRO board is automatically overclocked to 472MHz core/500MHz memory, an improvement of 52MHz on the graphics core and 68MHz on the memory subsystem. This nearly matches the now defunct X700 XT’s clock speeds of 475MHz core/525MHz memory, and is fully backed by Sapphire’s 3-year warranty.
In addition to APE, Sapphire bundles the TOXIC X700 PRO with copies of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (DVD-ROM) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Sapphire case badge, PowerDVD 5 (2-channel version), composite and S-Video cables, a DVI adapter, a metal grille for the exhaust end of the fan, and finally, a Sharkoon blue fluorescent lamp for lighting up the interior of your system case.
| Test systems | Page:: ( 4 / 20 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI
1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2
ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256MB
ATI RADEON X600 XT
Sapphire TOXIC X700 PRO 128MB
Driver version CAT 5.1
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT PCI-E
Driver version 67.66 (obtained off nZone website)
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
Far Cry 1.2 (custom demo for mp_jungle, SM2.0b and SM3.0 paths used)
DOOM 3 (gameplay custom demo)
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 5 / 20 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat | Page:: ( 6 / 20 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 7 / 20 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL
| Halo 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 20 ) |
Halo – Direct3D
| Far Cry Volcano | Page:: ( 9 / 20 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Volcano 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 10 / 20 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Training | Page:: ( 11 / 20 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Training 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 12 / 20 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| DOOM 3 Med Quality | Page:: ( 13 / 20 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 Medium Quality 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 14 / 20 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| Half-Life 2 | Page:: ( 15 / 20 ) |
Half-Life 2 – Direct3D
| Half-Life 2 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 16 / 20 ) |
Half-Life 2 – Direct3D
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 17 / 20 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
| Overclocking | Page:: ( 18 / 20 ) |
Half-Life 2 – Direct3D
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 19 / 20 ) |
Pros
X700 PRO core: As you saw in our benchmarks, ATI’s RADEON X700 PRO core delivers groundbreaking performance to the mainstream segment. While it isn’t quite as speedy as the GeForce 6600 GT overall, RADEON X700 PRO still delivers over twice the performance of its predecessor, RADEON X600 XT. In previous testing we’ve found it is quite capable of taking down the RADEON 9800 PRO, and at times, is capable of challenging even the flagship ATI card from a year ago, the RADEON 9800 XT.
Cooling: Sapphire has employed Arctic Cooling’s latest VGA Silencer for the TOXIC X700 PRO, and it works quite effectively. The heatsink’s copper base plate is quite frankly overkill for the RADEON X700 PRO VPU, with the chip running quite cool, even when overclocked. This heat is then passed on to the heatsink’s aluminum fins, before it is carried outside of the system case by the card’s ducted fan design.
The whole cooling system works quite effectively, even when the graphics card was overclocked to 495/535MHz. The board’s PCB itself was barely warm to the touch, with very little hot air exiting the card.
The card’s cooler barely breaks a sweat keeping the graphics core cool.
Silence: Not only does the Lethal Cooling do an excellent job of keeping the graphics core cool, it does so emitting virtually no noise. The Sapphire TOXIC X700 PRO is much quieter than ATI’s reference X700 PRO card, or even Sapphire’s own Hybrid X700 PRO. Not to mention GeForce 6600 GT. This is as quiet as it gets.
Bundle: Sapphire includes a fairly modern game bundle with the TOXIC X700 PRO, including copies of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The item that will probably draw the most attention though is the cold cathode fluorescent lamp from sharkoon.com though.
APE: If you’ve always wanted to dabble with overclocking, but were hesitant to do so, you’ll definitely enjoy Sapphire’s automated performance enhancement utility. At the click of a button, the TOXIC X700 PRO is instantly overclocked to 472MHz core/500MHz memory, nearly matching the specs of ATI’s X700 XT! Installing APE is quite easy, and it won’t void your card’s warranty. For even more performance, you can overclock your card even further via third party utilities such as Sapphire’s own Redline overclocking utility or PowerStrip.
Cons
128MB memory: The Achilles Heel of the TOXIC X700 PRO is definitely its small amount of memory: only 128MB. While most of today’s applications don’t take advantage of the additional storage space a 256MB frame buffer would provide, one notable title we tested certainly does benefit from 256MB of memory: Half-Life 2.
X800: Arguably the biggest obstacle hindering the TOXIC X700 PRO’s retail success is the RADEON X800. With its 12-pixel pipeline, 256-bit memory architecture and $200 price tag looming, the X800 is a huge threat to the TOXIC X700 PRO. Eventually both cards will be priced very closely to each other, when this occurs the TOXIC X700 PRO will be hard-pressed to compete with the X800.
After all, the RADEON X800 will deliver considerably more performance, and be priced similarly.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 20 / 20 ) |