After months of delay the GTX 480 finally graced us with its presence and while the model no doubt manages to pack a punch it didn’t have the power to take the top spot from the much loved dual GPU HD 5970. With ATI still holding the crown for the fastest video card on the market you have to wonder why Sapphire have chosen to attack the model and make it even faster? Well the answer to that question is easy; because they can!

Every aspect of the HD 5970 TOXIC is over the top, inside Sapphire have chosen to include Dirt 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 when it comes to games which help make it a stand out bundle. Also included is a Driver CD, Manual, Crossfire bridge, DVI to HDMI, DVI to VGA and Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort connectors.

The card itself sports a three fan cooler that takes up a whopping three slots, clearly something that isn’t for the faint hearted. While that much cooling power might not be needed it’s no doubt appreciated on a card that has had the core bumped from 725MHz to 900MHz and a memory clock from 4000MHz QDR to 4800MHz QDR. If that wasn’t enough though Sapphire have chosen to take the already massive 2GB of GDDR5 memory to 4GB.

All this extra grunt means we need some more power and instead of the 6-Pin / 8-Pin PCI-E Power connector setup the HD 5970 TOXIC is a dual 8-Pin card. It shouldn’t be an issue to most people though since the chances are you’ll already have a power supply that’s more than capable of handing the model considering how much this card will set you back. Also on the card we’ve got a single CrossFire connector across the top and looking at connectivity we’ve got two Dual-Link DVI connectors and a single Mini DisplayPort one.

The only thing bigger than the cooler and the overclock though is the performance, P24908 and X16575 under Vantage means the card is dam fast. Every benchmark saw the card offer an average above 60 FPS at all resolutions including the intensive 2560 x 1600. When it came to AA performance we tend to see ATI cards struggle but with the amount of power on offer from the HD 5970 TOXIC this wasn’t the case.

Due to the crashing dollar the price has sky rocketed to over $1500 and really for most this isn’t going to be a card you would buy. With only a limited amount of cards available globally though we’re sure the high price isn’t going to be an issue for Sapphire when it comes to getting rid of the model.

It’s hard to recommend the HD 5970 TOXIC for the simple fact that you could buy a HD 5970 CrossfireX setup for less money. It doesn’t stop the card from being an absolute masterpiece though and really shows us what Sapphire is capable off. While ATI might have stabbed NVIDIA with the knife Sapphire have come along and twisted it just to make sure they’re hurting.

So the question we need to ask is who should buy it? Anyone who has some serious money to blow and wants to own the fastest single video card in the world. It’s not going to be the wisest investment but at least you’ll have a good time.

Pros: Performance, Bundle, Quality
Cons: Price, Triple Slot

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