Getting PhysX on our Sapphire HD 5970 TOXIC

The whole process is actually pretty easy; while there are two options to get the whole thing up and running generally, because we wanted to use the GTX 480 the sideband driver option wasn't a choice, as it hasn't been updated yet.

A smart cookie over at NGOHQ forums named GenL does a Hybrid PhysX Mod which we mentioned recently in our news column here. Apart from this, the only other pieces of kit you'll need are drivers. Today we used the ATI Catalyst 10.3a drivers and NVIDIA ForceWare 197.41 drivers.

First we install both driver packs and then we run the Hybrid PhysX Mod. Once we reboot we right click our Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit desktop and select Screen Resolution and next to the monitors hit detect. Now, in the notes for the PhysX Mod it says that you need to assign a monitor etc. - But we didn't have to.

Once this was done we fired up the NVIDIA Control Panel and enabled PhysX. Now, people say you can run Fluidmark to see if it's working, but we opted to just go straight for Vantage which we know makes use of PhysX. Before we got stuck into the performance, though, we did take the time to overclock our cards again using MSI Afterburner.

Our HD 5970 TOXIC was bumped from 900MHz on the core to 960MHz, while we moved the memory from 4800MHz QDR too 4920MHz QDR. Not the highest overclock from the card we've had, but it was a little more squashed in our testbed than last time, so we didn't want to push the card quite as hard.

The GIGABYTE GTX 480 got the same overclocking love; we moved that from 701MHz on the core and 1401MHz on the Shader to 800MHz and 1600MHz respectively. As for the memory, that got a bump from 3696MHz QDR to 3900MHz QDR.

Due to the fact that the Sapphire HD 5970 TOXIC is a three slot card, we had to throw the GTX 480 in our x4 slot. However, testing has shown a limited difference in performance when compared to being in a x16 one; especially in a situation where the card is only doing PhysX.