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- Date:
- Monday , August 14, 2006
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Sapphire TOXIC Liquid Cooled X1900 XTX
A self-contained liquid cooling system built around an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX GPU? Sapphire has engineered a user friendly liquid cooling system using the fastest ATI GPU overclocked right out of the box. We evaluate performance compared to the competition, heat and overclocking.
Introduction
When it comes to keeping processors cool the best method enthusiasts employ is liquid cooling, or more commonly called water cooling, though a coolant solution is used over pure water. It provides the benefit of being a silent solution and it provides much better heat transfer and cooling than standard air heatsink/fan units. Water cooling has become so popular and easy to setup these days that it has moved into the video card cooling realm. It is amazing how much heat and power today’s GPUs are pulling. Water cooling is not a necessity, but for enthusiasts who want to push their GPUs to the limits of overclocking or who want to maintain a silent computer solution water cooling is used.
There are kits you can buy online these days that provide water blocks that will fit current printed circuit board layouts on popular video cards. You can use these blocks to connect to your already existing water cooling hardware for your CPU or dedicate the unit to your video card. Doing this however has the downside of completely ruining your warranty because you will have to dissect your video card to create water cooling solution. This method is not for the timid. If you break your video card in the process it is like throwing money down the drain.
What if you could have water cooling on a video card without these worries? What if a video card shipped in retail with a self-contained liquid cooling system that is assembled and fully under warranty from the manufacturer? What if this video card was using the latest and greatest GPU out there with factory overclocked speeds? What if I were to tell you that a video card meeting all this criteria exists today?
No joke folks, there is such a beast. Straight out of the Sapphire engineering labs is the Sapphire TOXIC Liquid Cooled X1900 XTX video card.
Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX
The Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX is built on the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX GPU. The architecture contains 48 pixel shader processors (ALUs), 16 texture mapping units, and 16 raster operators. Shader Model 3.0 is supported in DirectX 9.0c along with HDR and the ability to have antialiasing enabled with HDR. You will also find ATI’s unique ring bus memory architecture and ultrathreaded dedicated branching units. The suggested clock speeds from ATI for the X1900 XTX are 650 MHz core frequency and 1.55 GHz memory frequency.
It is not common to have factory overclocked ATI based GPU video cards. This is a new practice that is starting to make its way onto this platform. On the NVIDIA side of things there are many add-in-board manufacturers that have been factory overclocking NVIDIA GPU based video cards for several years now. ATI in the past has kept tight control on their clock speeds through the add-in-board manufacturers to maintain stability with their GPUs. It seems that ATI may be starting to relax that policy. Sapphire has certainly embraced this on their highest performance video card available by offering a factory overclocked X1900 XTX version under the TOXIC model name.
The Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX comes clocked at a default core speed of 675 MHz (a 25 MHz overclock from the stock speeds), and a memory clock of 1.6 GHz (a 25 MHz overclock from the stock memory speeds). While this isn’t a huge overclock, relatively speaking it is the fastest retail X1900 XTX you can pick up right out of the box.
What is most unique about this video card though is that fact that it has a completely self-contained liquid cooling unit attached to it. By self-contained we mean that the radiator, pump, and reservoir are contained within their own sleek package that fits into a case slot on the back of your case and is pre-filled with coolant. It has tubes that connect to a preassembled water block attached to the GPU on the video card. You don’t have to do a thing; everything is assembled and ready to go out of the box!
Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX Pictures
The Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX bundle comes in a clear plastic box with a carrying handle. Inside are two compartments that are separated. When you pull out the main large section you will find that it splits into two pieces revealing the video card and water cooling system. At the bottom of the box is another compartment containing all the cables and software. The video card is held firmly in place and protected well.
In the primary container are the video card and water cooling system. They are separated as two distinct pieces connected via the tubes that move the liquid through the water block on the GPU. Both units require external power. The video card needs external power provided by the PCI-Express power connector and the water cooling unit needs power from a Molex connector.
What makes this setup unique is that the water cooling unit is completely self-contained in a one-slot low-profile unit. In fact the size of this unit is exactly the same size of the video card. Inside you will find a 12V mini pump, reservoir, copper radiator and large fan in the center. The fan penetrates the entire unit and allows airflow through both sides. There is a plastic tab on one end so that you can place it in a PCI slot and screw it down to your case.
The switch on the side of the unit allows you to change between a high fan speed and low fan speed and provides a power light. The low fan speed operates at 2000 RPM and produces 18 dB of noise; the high speed mode operates at 2500 RPM and produces 26 dB. Therefore you can decide if you want to operate at the default clock speeds set by the factory in which case you can use the low fan speed for less noise or if you want to go extreme and overclock high then set the fan speed to high.
On the back side where the cables are it has a transparent window that lets you see the coolant fluid level. The unit comes preassembled with all the coolant filled for you so you don’t have to do anything. There is a line that tells you if the coolant is low, and then you would have to add some more by removing the cap on the end.
The video card itself is a standard ATI Radeon X1900 XTX PCB design. The heatsink/fan unit has been stripped and in place lies a pure copper water block. The water block is held security in place with custom screws that connect to a backside bracket. The tubing seems very robust making it less susceptible to breaking or being cut, but still be careful handling it. The RAM is passively cooled with some aluminum heatsinks. This video card does use the Rage Theater chip for full video in / video out (VIVO) capabilities. Two dual-link DVI ports are included with a multimedia port capable of HDTV out, S-video out and in and composite out and in.
Two DVI to VGA adapters are included along with a PCI-Express to Molex power adapter. You also get an S-Video cable, Composite cable, HDTV cable and splitter allowing S-Video and Composite in and out. There is a full manual included along with full versions of PowerDVD 6, PowerDirector 4, and some game demos and driver CD.
Installing the video card is done just like any other video card, you place it in the PCI-Express slot. The water cooling unit has a plastic tab underneath that allows you to plug it into the first PCI slot below the video card. We tried plugging it into the PCI-Express x1 slot (which would be too close to the video card) and the secondary PCI-Express x16 slot, neither worked. It will only fit into a PCI slot. This means you do lose the use of the first PCI slot down from the video card. The water cooling unit has a bracket so you can screw it into your case to keep it secure.
The video card does support CrossFire and this solution would actually work, but you’d lose the use of every slot on the motherboard. Meaning you’d only be able to have the CrossFire master card installed and the Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX installed with the water cooling unit, there wouldn’t be any room left for anything else, unless you had a large motherboard with more than standard connectors.
When the water cooling unit is powered the fan lights up with blue LEDs. Turning the fan speed from low to high increases the brightness of the LEDs.