Life is full of near-misses: the penalty kick that sweeps just past the post; the movie that blows you away in the opening scene but then goes on to star Nicolas Cage; and the TV series that has you hooked until you find out the damn thing was cancelled halfway through the series. So many almost perfect things just don't quite deliver. We can now add the Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1950XTX to that list - it's a very fast graphics card with its own water-cooling system, but it just doesn't go far enough.
So what's wrong with Sapphire's latest Toxic? Well, on the face of it, not very much at all. It's based around the Radeon X1950XTX and uses the same two-part cooling system as that of the original Toxic Radeon X1900XTX. The card itself has a waterblock covering the GPU; pre-fitted piping runs to a water-cooling unit, which needs to be seated in a PCI slot. The water-cooling unit doesn't draw power from the PCI slot, instead requiring a Molex connection. The water-cooling unit integrates the pump, reservoir, radiator and fan in one case, and it's pre-filled and ready to work straight away. The fan has two speeds that are controlled by an inconvenient switch on the side of the water-cooling unit. It isn't silent, but it isn't overly noisy either, and it's quieter than the reference cooler. Sapphire supplies a small utility that allows you to apply an overclock to the Radeon X1950XTX GPU, pushing it to 662MHz (from 650MHz) - although at the time of writing, Sapphire informed us that it might be higher for final retail cards, since their samples are overclocking so well. The 512MB of GDDR4 remains clocked at the ruthless ATi reference speed of 1GHz (2GHz effective).
The main problem with the Toxic lies with this cooling, as the waterblock only covers the GPU. If you're investing in a water-cooling system for a graphics card, it seems an oversight to leave the memory out of the loop.
It's still quick of course, and with its small overclock, the Toxic performed marginally better than the HIS Radeon X1950XTX. The Toxic was able to provide playable frame rates in two out of three of our standard game benchmarks at 1,920 x 1,200 with AA and AF. Need for Speed: Most Wanted had nothing on the Toxic, and we could play at the native resolution of our 24in widescreen test monitor without the action slowing down. Prey should have given the Toxic more to chew on, but the card averaged a massive 50fps at the top settings. However, F.E.A.R. and the outdoor environment of The Elder Scolls IV: Oblivion were just too much, meaning that you'll have to drop AA and AF settings, or tweak the detail options.
The Radeon X1950XTX fares surprisingly well against the GeForce 7950 GX2. With a good SLI profile, as in F.E.A.R., the GeForce 7950 GX2 is clearly faster, but the differences between the two shrink to tiny amounts in other games such as Need for Speed.
With a water-cooling system attached, we were keen to try overclocking, but it proved to be a tricky task. Firstly, the RAM speed wasn't going anywhere, thanks to the lame passive heatsinks. The second reason that the Toxic floundered during overclocking is that the ATi driver doesn't have the capacity to go above a 700MHz core speed. Overclocking utilities such as ATITool and PowerStrip have trouble differentiating between the 2D and 3D speeds, making them useless. ATi's utility, imaginatively called Overclocker, was able to raise the core to 725MHz, although this didn't do much for our benchmark scores.
CONCLUSION
It's great to see Sapphire doing something different, but the card doesn't overclock as well as we'd like. It's a shame that the cooling system doesn't cover the RAM, and it's a pain that overclocking ATi cards is so tricky. Unfortunately, time is also against the company, as it's 'End Game' for DirectX 9 cards. Making the most of DirectX 10 will require a new graphics card. On balance, it seems like a bad time to invest in a top-spec DirectX 9 card, and the Toxic is quite an investment.
Author: Phil Hartup
Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1950XTX