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For the review today we have built a strong system which we feel would fit in well with the audience purchasing these cards. We are using a Core i7 950 Quad Core CPU with 6GB of DDR3 memory. We have applied a moderate overclock to the processor because we know you guys never run anything at reference speeds!
We are also going to limit testing to 1920×1080 (1080) and 1920×1200 as less than 1% of the enthusiast user base reading this will have a 30 inch screen – this will address the widest possible audience.
We will however dedicate a page to 3x monitor testing, for those of you lucky enough to have access to three 23/24 inch screens.
Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition (970/1150)
Other cards:
eVGA GTX460 FTW (850/1000)
nVidia GTX460 Talon Attack (810/975)
AMD Reference HD6870 (900/1050)
AMD Reference HD6850 (775/1000)
AMD Reference HD5870 (850/1200)
AMD Reference HD5850 (725/1000)
AMD Reference HD5770 (850/1200)
nVidia Reference GTX460 (675/900)
eVGA GTX460 768MB SC (763/950)
nVidia Reference GTX 460 768MB (675/900)
XFX HD5830 XXX (840/1125)
nVidia Reference GTS 450 (850/1000)
XFX HD5750 XXX (740/1200)
AMD reference HD5750 (700/1150)
Other Hardware:
Processor: Intel Core i7 950 @ 3.6ghz
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Motherboard: ASRock X58 Extreme 6
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz 6GB (3x2GB)
Power Supply: Thermaltake 750W Toughpower Grand
Chassis: Cooler Master CM 690 II
Camera: Nikon D300S SLR
Optical: Asus BluRay Player
Camera: Nikon D300S with R1C1
Monitors: Dell Ultrasharp U2410 (A00)
Iiyama ProLite E2472HDD x2
Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
HQV Benchmark
Catalyst 11.1 Driver
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra
Cyberlink Media Espresso
Forceware 266.58 WHQL
Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Games:
Resident Evil 5
Lost Planet 2
Far Cry 2
Tom Clancy H.A.W.X.
Metro 2033
Alien V Predator
Mafia 2
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.
That is one seriously awesome mid range board. Sapphire do it again !
Great work man, covered all the bases. amazing temps, my 5770 runs hotter.
This is a damn good indication of why sapphire are still the leaders for AMD products.
My friend just read this review and wants the card. waiting patiently in the UK for it now 😉
excellent, the price is very good, although the 6950 isn’t much more really…..
That fan is a very unusual design, is it tapered at the edges? most fans at this size have 9 blades. very clever.
Very nice indeed and im not sure what the guy earlier was smoking, the HD6950 is £240 in the UK, thats £30-35 more. quite significant in this sector.
Nice one, any ideas when the USA gets this baby?
Where can you get the trixx tool? I dont see it online anywhere. does it work with any card?
Im impressed and thats hard to do now with the over saturation of cards on the market from so many companies. This stands out enough to get major sales for sapphire.
I dont like AMD hardware, but the temperatures on this card are incredible, very impressive engineering from Sapphire.
fucking hell, thats a crazy core clock speed.
great review again. do you ever sleep?
Excellent, would like to see this head to head with 560.
I bought sapphire 6870 last year because I couldn’t wait for the toxic edition. The temp for furmark was 89C in just 1minute not to mention how loud the fan was. So I bought the AC TTP, now peak at 63C for 15mins, I’m very happy.
@Ethan: Running cards around 90 is not always a problem, as we’ve seen from the GTX480. But it is always a pain when the cooling solution is screaming at you 🙁 Glad you found a better solution! Just out of interest, when you bought it, how much was the AC TTP ?
I checked ur original HD6870 review, and it seems that despite being 70Mhz higher clocked, this TOXIC edition card consumes only 3W higher than reference card. This is nothing short of amazing.
Considering you are getting higher than HD5870 performance by a 250$ card whereas only last year HD5870 was selling for 400$