Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 and 670, which has caused HD 7970's pricing to go down quite a bit.



Sapphire's HD 7970 Toxic 6 GB is a maxed out enthusiast class design of the HD 7970. It uses a large dual-fan cooler by Sapphire, paired with a custom-designed PCB and 6 GB of fast GDDR5 memory. Sapphire has also overclocked their card out of the box to frequencies of 1100 MHz GPU and 1500 MHz memory. You can use Sapphire's "Lethal Boost" button that is implemented using the dual-BIOS function, should you want to take the HD 7970 to even higher performance levels. With this BIOS, clocks are increased to 1200 MHz GPU and 1600 MHz memory.

In our Sapphire's HD 7970 Toxic 6 GB review we will test both the normal and the boost BIOS (results marked as "Sapphire HD 7970 Toxic Boost").

Pricing of the Sapphire HD 7970 Toxic 6 GB is certainly not low; the card retails around $700.