Published in Reviews

Sapphire Toxic HD 4870 is cool

by on26 September 2008

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Preview: Vapor-X is back

Sapphire's latest addition to its Toxic lineup of graphics cards has arrived at our lab. The new RV770 powered Toxic card is using a Vapor-X cooler and, of course, it is factory overclocked.

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The new card works at 780MHz for the GPU and comes with 512MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4,000MHz (quad data rate). Just for comparison, the reference card works at 750MHz for the GPU and 3,600MHz for the GDDR5 memory.

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Vapor-X cooling is back, and it had no trouble cooling the 55nm RV770 GPU and the rest of the card. The Vapor-X cooling is based on vapor chamber technology, and it did a great job on previous Sapphire cards. We reviewed the HD 3870 Atomic Edition here. The main difference from the previous Vapor-X cooler is usage of three heat pipes.

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The new RV770 chip is hot and vapor chamber alone (the main part of the Vapor-X cooling system) is not enough to cool it down. The new cooler uses a single, centered-placed thermal-controlled fan, which is used to cool down the heatsink with three copper heatpipes. The GPU is in direct contact with the vapor chamber which is only 3mm thick. Before we paint you a full picture, we have some results for you.

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The temperatures

As you can see, the temperatures are well below the standard version. We got the first sample, but in the meantime Sapphire contacted us, telling us that they have new bios which will be used on production cards. The final version will be a little hotter, but that is nothing to worry about. We used Riva Tuner to fix fan speed at 30% (1820 RPM, inaudible) and the temperature jumped up to 61.

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As you can see, HD 4870 Toxic card is faster than the standard one, and with such powerful cooling, we expect some significant OC potential. 
Last modified on 27 September 2008
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