SAPPHIRE TOXIC HD6950 Video Card Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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SAPPHIRE TOXIC HD6950 Video Card Review - SAPPHIRE claims to have produced the fastest HD 6950 on the market in the SAPPHIRE HD6950 TOXIC Edition. It competes with a stock Radeon HD 6950 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570. We also put it to the test against a Radeon HD 6970 and GeForce GTX 580 with results that might shock you. And did we mention you get two free games?
 
That is a sick card if it really does cool as well as everyone says and quiet at the same time! And of course it's OOS at Newegg right now...
 
Pretty nice card! Even comes with the unlock bios! If I were buying amd this is the card I would get.

Though I ended up getting a gtx 570 for $230 after mir and I am happy with it.
 
That is an impressive product.

Too bad about the PowerTune problem. I suppose flashing the BIOS is easy enough though.
 
That is an impressive product.

Too bad about the PowerTune problem. I suppose flashing the BIOS is easy enough though.

It was extremely easy, provided you have a DOS boot disk or DOS boot USB stick. The ghost image USB sticks we use allows us to exit to DOS. From there it was just a matter of running atiflash-3.91.exe and using the right command lines to program the .T44 (yeah, not a ROM, .T44 extension) onto the video card. Did not take long at all to flash both BIOS's. After rebooting, performance was immediately where it needed to be without having to use PowerTune.
 
And don't forget, 2 free games right now, the performance potential, plus the free games, its really a good deal right now. When you can get 6970/GTX 580 performance, for a lot cheaper price, with free games, it can be nothing but win.
 
That's a nice card right there.:cool:

My 6950s were all reference, and easily were flashed to the 6970 shaders.
Performance is exceptional.

Since the reference models are done, this Sapphire is the card to buy.:D
 
A 1536 bios... so it was a shader without actually calling it that on the review? Here I thought the gpus were being laser cut to prevent that from happening any more as people who bought the MSI 6950 Twin Frozr III found out.
 
Thats one of the clearest Gold award cards I've seen in a while. Killer performance and a great price. Awesome. Too bad I really don't need it right now. With my current rig I have no reason to upgrade until the 7xxx series cards are released at the very earliest. If I was buying a card in the near future though, this would clearly be it.
 
Awesome performance for the price & 2 free games to boot is nothing to sneeze at.

Reselling the games, can make this almost a $200 card! :eek: BIG WIN!
 
wow nice.

great card, low price, comes with 2 free new games.

if i needed a video card i'd buy this up in a heart beat!
 
I have the catalyst 11.8 (Driver Packaging Version 8.881-110728a-122939C-ATI) but my powertune only goes to 20%. This is on a Gigabyte ref design 6950 (unlocked shaders). Which Catalyst drivers have the Powertune with the range of -50% to +50%?
 
I hope not to use the Catalyst 11.8 Preview anymore in the presence of Catalyst 11.8 WHQL, because of the 11.8 WHQL slower than 11.8 Preview

unledqi.jpg


http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...cht-amd-catalyst-11.8/4/#abschnitt_testsystem
 
I have the catalyst 11.8 (Driver Packaging Version 8.881-110728a-122939C-ATI) but my powertune only goes to 20%. This is on a Gigabyte ref design 6950 (unlocked shaders). Which Catalyst drivers have the Powertune with the range of -50% to +50%?

We were using 11.8 Preview as stated in the review.

Also, we noticed NO performance difference between +20% and +50%. You'll be just fine at +20%. We just used it, and tested it, to make sure, +20% was enough,
 
God I just bought two regular Sapphire 6950s...

And both brick if I try the 6970 bios and no shaders will unlock. Damnit.

The only thing I don't like about this card (and many of Sapphire's cards) is the picture of the monk/warrior/sorceress, what have you that they often have on their card stickers.
 
Are the free game coupons in the box? The retailer near me lists nothing about the free games with this product.
 
Where can we get the new bios? Its not on Sapphires website.

It is not public yet, as soon as they release it we'll post a news bit about it, and update the evaluation.

In the meantime, manually setting PowerTune to +20% fixes the issue.
 
"This is a perfect example of HardOCP finding a problem, communicating with the corresponding company, and getting a fix for the community. If we had not gotten our hands on this card, who knows how long it would have been before this problem would have been found. How it got by SAPPHIRE and shipped with this major flaw is beyond us. What we do appreciate though is SAPPHIRE's good communication and getting this BIOS fix to us, and to the community."

Gotta love the [H]
 
Holy crap. I figured this card would be good, but I am very impressed. I'm going to keep an eye on these. Hopefully they'll be in stock when I buy my parts so I can grab two of them. Great review Grady and it's great to hear you guys working with Sapphire to get a problem fixed that no one else seemed to notice, stuff like that is one of the reasons why I always point people to [H]'s reviews.
 
And for anyone wondering, I checked back into an old review (inc. a 580), the review rigs are the same/very close, and w/ the 580, ref./stock clocked, the rig pulled 505w, vs. the 463w quoted here for the 1536 shader BIOS.
 
SO... just to satisfy my noob-ness:

The Toxic with the 1536 BIOS overclocked should perform no differently than a 6970 at any resolution? What about in a Xfire config with a a true 6970 or 6990? If so, it's damn compelling at that price point.

I ask because I just acquired a third monitor to complete my Eyefinity setup (5760x1200), and I'm trying to figure our what card to buy to push it and what the upgrade path is going forward.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
 
SO... just to satisfy my noob-ness:

The Toxic with the 1536 BIOS overclocked should perform no differently than a 6970 at any resolution? What about in a Xfire config with a a true 6970 or 6990? If so, it's damn compelling at that price point.

Why not just buy 2 Toxic 6950 cards CF? Too bad your MB in sig doesn't have 3 PCIE for Tri-Fire.

3 Toxic cards for eyefinity is VERY appealing to me right now... Sell games & have great Eyefinity setup for +/-$650!
 
Wow, great review guys.

I can already see that this is going to be one insanely popular card that will probably always be out of stock as this is perhaps the best value in video cards that we've seen in a long time. With the card unlocked, I find it insane that there was still more performance to be had by further overclocking. I'm a bit disappointed that this doesn't sport a custom fan, but those temps arn't bad at all and you can't argue with the performance.

I'm waiting on the ATI 7000 and nVidia 600 series before my next upgrade, but this would perhaps be the card I would buy if I was looking for something now. That is a lot of extra stuff for the money that you pay!
 
I am still cannot recommend Sapphire due to all the horror stores I have heard over the years being on this forum. Any remember that x1950 thread when the OP got a clear down grade from RMA? That thread got pretty big.
 
I am still cannot recommend Sapphire due to all the horror stores I have heard over the years being on this forum. Any remember that x1950 thread when the OP got a clear down grade from RMA? That thread got pretty big.

Outside of a few examples customer support on PC parts might as well be non-existent especially with GPUs. I haven't heard too much bad about Sapphire lately though so they might be trying to really improve their image with the enthusiast market.
 
I am still cannot recommend Sapphire due to all the horror stores I have heard over the years being on this forum. Any remember that x1950 thread when the OP got a clear down grade from RMA? That thread got pretty big.

Every manufacturer will have horror stories like that at some point. The big picture is whether a manufacturer continues to have horror stories or whether they improve and become more consumer friendly. Everything we have seen seems to indicate that the latter is true with Sapphire. Plus their contributions to that Dallas GamExperience thing appeared to be very generous as well.
 
lol @ the graphic of the keyhole on the card.

Look at the pictures again. It's not a graphic. There's an actual chromed part on the shroud.

Grady/Brent/Kyle, does that part actually do anything?

Also, please do a video card rain dance type thing and get some inventory back in stock at newegg!

Dang, looks like the card even comes with a long Crossfire cable. That's pretty sweet.
 
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