Posted on Friday, January 21 2011 @ 17:26 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Sapphire officially introduced the Radeon HD 6870 Vapor-X and the Radeon HD 6870 TOXIC. The Vapor-X edition features the company's Vapor-X cooling solution and has the reference clockspeeds of 900MHz core and 4200MHz memory. The TOXIC edition on the other hand is overclocked, this card has a 970MHz core and 4600MHz memory.
The SAPPHIRE HD 6870 TOXIC Edition has the same internal architecture as the standard model, with 1120 stream processors and 56 texture processing units, but clock speeds are increased to 970MHz for the core and 1150Mhz (4.6 Gb/sec effective) for the memory giving users a considerable boost in performance. The same SAPPHIRE exclusive cooler will also be offered on a model with the standard clocks of 900MHz core / 1050MHz memoy (4.2Gb/sec effective) – the SAPPHIRE HD 6870 Vapor-X Edition.
The SAPPHIRE exclusive Vapor-X cooler ensures that the card runs quietly and efficiently. Together with other special hardware features including on-board 10-phase power control and SAPPHIRE’s highly efficient, cool running patented second generation Black Diamond chokes this ensures there is a good margin for performance tuning (overclocking) by enthusiast users. SAPPHIRE’s overclocking tool for these models - TriXX - is available for users to download from the SAPPHIRE Select Club – free for SAPPHIRE enthusiasts to join online.
Eyefinity and Eyespeed
The SAPPHIRE HD 6870 TOXIC Edition has the versatile output configuration of two DVI, one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort connectors. Using two of the DVI/HDMI outputs as well as the two DisplayPorts enables this card to support up to four monitors in Eyefinity (SLS) mode. With the release of the DisplayPort v1.2 drivers, it will be also be possible to daisy chain additional DisplayPort v1.2 monitors from each DisplayPort output.
In the HD 6870 TOXIC Edition the third generation UVD (Unified Video Decoder) supports MVC (Multi-view Video Coding) for the smooth decoding of Blu-Ray 3D with reduced CPU load as well as other file formats. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are supported, and HDMI capability has also been upgraded to HDMI 1.4a. This now provides deep colour, enhanced high resolution output for Digital Theatre applications and 3D stereoscopic support as well as 7.1 high bit-rate audio.
The multiple stream processors of the HD 6800 series can be used to accelerate other applications such as video transcoding. The latest generation of web browsers can be GPU accelerated, and this is also supported for enhanced productivity in Microsoft Office 2010.
Second Generation DX11 support
The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series features the second generation of graphics technology from AMD designed to support all the features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11. The new GPU’s are built in AMD’s 40nm process to deliver high performance with low power consumption. Advanced hardware features include an enhanced Tessellation unit, dedicated HDR Texture compression, multi-threaded communication with system CPU cores, embedded support for many of the DirectCompute 11 instructions, 3D stereoscopic support, HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2.
The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series is supported by AMD's DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver which delivers support for all of the key DirectX 11 features required for enhanced gaming experiences as well as GPU acceleration of supported applications.
About Vapor-X
SAPPHIRE Technology was the first company to implement cooling for PC graphics cards based on Vapor Chamber Technology and has now implemented it in several successful product series. SAPPHIRE’s Vapor-X cooler technology was first introduced in 2007 with its HD 3870 ATOMIC Edition graphics card and then rolled out to the global market with the successful HD 3870 and HD 4870 TOXIC Editions and the Vapor-X series.
More recently Vapor-X cooling has been used on several highly successful HD 5000 series TOXIC Edition and Vapor-X models for the global market.
