Introduction

Sapphire's TOXIC name isn't one we've heard for a while. Originally we heard about the branding a little bit behind the scenes in January, but nothing eventuated. For the most part we think it was a combination of Sapphire trying to get the clocks they wanted combined with the fact that stock wasn't the best earlier in the year.

Jump forward over six months, though, and we've got the new GHz Edition HD 7970 from AMD which means we've got some higher binned GPUs. That should ultimately mean we've got a chance to get even better clock speeds than ever. The TOXIC series is one that has always impressed us and we hope this trend continues with the latest model.

As always, though, there are a few things we need to do before we find out just what the new TOXIC based HD 7970 GHz Edition video card is capable of. The first thing we're going to do is check out the package and bundle. Because Sapphire got the card to us nice and early, we didn't have the full retail package and bundle included.

Sapphire was able to send us over an image of the box, though, so we can work off that and we have got the cable bundle included so we can cover that as well. Next we'll move onto the card itself to see what's going on with the cooler that Sapphire has opted for before we check out the specifications and see just what the TOXIC branding brings in terms of clock speeds.

We'll quickly cover the testbed and the cards that will be included in our graphs today before we finally get into the fun stuff and see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of this bad boy before we wrap everything up in our final thoughts. First, though, let's get into the package to see just what's going on.

Package

Having a look at our box render we can see that the video card is clearly part of the TOXIC series and based on the new GHz Edition of the Radeon HD 7970 GPU which just launched last month. The other big stand out on the box, though, is the massive 6GB of GDDR5 that is present. This is something we haven't seen from anyone yet and it's great to see Sapphire make the move.

While we're missing the likes of a driver CD, manual and CrossFire bridge, you can see starting from the left we've got a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort connector, Mini DisplayPort to DVI, full length HDMI cable, two dual Molex to 8-pin PCIe power connectors along with a DVI to VGA connector to round off the bundle side of things. Sapphire has been strong when it's come to connectors on the HD 7000 series and this time is no different.