Can you ever have too much of a good thing? When it comes to processing power, probably not, unless you have to make some serious concessions. There are quite a few products on the market aimed at gamers and enthusiasts that emphasize the speed, but lose some of the basic features of the said piece. It seems to be an assumption by the manufacturers that if you are buying an enthusiast/gamer piece of equipment, you probably won’t be using some of the more basic features, so to cut costs they may be left off. There have even been a few AMD 790/890GX based motherboards that were tweaked towards gamers that even had the outputs for the IGP left off. True, you are probably not going to be using a $200 MB with IGP, but what if you simply want to use it for a second monitor? Or perhaps you want to use it for a second PC at some point when you upgrade your main rig. Thankfully, this practice is less common with video cards, which are becoming much more capable of multi-monitor and HTPC uses, as well having GPUs more capable of handling certain tasks than CPUs. AMD’s Advanced Parallel Processing and nVidia’s Cuda have made leaps and bounds in making the CPU and GPU work in harmony.

 

 

We are already well aware that the AMD HD 6870 is a serious gaming GPU, but Sapphire has taken it to the next level with the HD 6870 Toxic Edition with Vapor-X cooling. The Sapphire HD 6870 Toxic pushes the 6870 GPU to speeds we have not seen in a factory OC previously, taking performance to its maximum. Featuring all of the 6870’s benefits, including 1120 stream processors and 56 texture processing units, the Sapphire HD 6870 Toxic bumps the core clock to a staggering 970MHz and ups memory speed to 1150Mhz. The excess heat generated by this type of OC is handled by the well tested Vapor-X cooling system. Using a high flow fan (rather than the reference type box fan) along with an improved airflow path, the Vapor-X cooler is able to keep the HD 6870 Toxic cool and quiet, even under heavy gaming conditions. This improved cooling not only keeps the card cool out of the box, but opens up some headroom to explore even further overclocking possibilities.

 

Even though the Sapphire HD 6870 Toxic is obviously a gaming card, it offers excellent flexibility for a number of other areas. The HD 6870 Toxic sports Eyefinity technology, allowing for connection of up to five monitors simultaneously using Display Port 1.2 at a resolution of 2560×1600. All outputs are capable of Stereoscopic 3D to add to any Home Theater or gaming experience. The HDMI output of the HD 6870 Toxic is capable of 7.1 channel audio to further simplify any HTPC setup, while still delivering top notch video and audio. With AMD’s Stream Technology, you can even tap into the power of your HD 6870 GPU for transcoding tasks, easing the burden on your CPU and directing these to the more capable GPU. The Sapphire HD 6870 Toxic offers extreme gaming possibilities, while still retaining all of the versatility you would expect from an HD 6870.

 

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