Date:
Monday , August 14, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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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.

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System Test Setup

For our system platform setup we are using an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 SLI MCP) with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 Dual Core 2.8 GHz processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS DDR2 800 MHz RAM at 5-5-5-12 1T. We are using the latest nForce4 drivers available for this motherboard and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Cards

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Both video cards were tested at their default frequencies as you can see above. For the Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX we used Catalyst 6.7 WHQL for all games except Oblivion which we used Beta Catalyst 6.6 with the Chuck patch to allow HDR + AA in that game. For the BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 we used beta ForceWare 91.33 from nZone.

Why we chose to compare to GeForce 7950 GX2

You are probably wondering why we chose the GeForce 7950 GX2 as the comparison video card; after all it is two GPUs in SLI versus one single GPU video card. The reason comes down to pricing. We try to match cards up by what we can find them for on the street, the street being online e-tailers where video cards are sold. Typically you will find the best prices online. We match video cards by price so that we can see which one is providing the best “bang for the buck” or value for your dollar.

The Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX was at Newegg with a retail price of $549 just a couple of weeks ago. Now, however, it seems to not be listed there. We found it just recently at Allstarshop for $595 and at Bytewize for a whopping $656. This is about $100-200 more expensive than other ATI Radeon X1900 XTX based video cards. We looked to see what NVIDIA has at $550. What we found was that the GeForce 7950 GX2 is the video card at this price range. The BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 which we have here for evaluation purposes sits at $629

However, there are cheaper 7950 GX2’s available; in fact here is one that is exactly $540 but comes with a mail in rebate that would make it $509. We then looked at the prices on GeForce 7900 GTX video cards and found them to range from $469 - $499 and at $499 they had mail in rebates to make them cheaper.

If the Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX was $100 cheaper like the other X1900 XTX’s we would compare it to the GeForce 7900 GTX. But the facts are that the Sapphire TOXIC X1900 XTX is priced at a level that matches GeForce 7950 GX2’s. Therefore that is what we will compare since they are price comparable.

The goals of this evaluation are to see how these two video cards compare in games in performance and image quality. These video cards are price comparable. We will be testing on a 19” CRT at 4:3 resolutions as well as a Dell 2405FPW 24” LCD which has a native resolution of 1920x1200.

Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

P ADAA = Performance Adaptive AA – This indicates the use of Performance mode Adaptive AA on X1000 series ATI cards.

Q ADAA = Quality Adaptive AA – This indicates the use of Quality mode Adaptive AA on X1000 series ATI cards.

HQ AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.