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Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic Edition
A Closer Look
The first thing I noticed about the 4870 Toxic Edition's box after receiving it was how sharp the box looked. It’s hard to tell in these photographs, but the silhouette guy on here is made of reflective material and it looks really cool. The box is solid and thankfully nothing rattles around inside of it. On the back you can see all of the features listed, but don’t bother straining your eyes to read them, just go to the page before. Other than the crammed back panel, the box has a very minimalist look and feel to it.
Front of the Box |
Back of the Box |
Side 1 |
Side 2 |
Inside of that outer box is an inner box that is stuffed with a foam-like material to keep the video card from rattling around even if UPS decides to drop kick your package. Inside the package was:
- Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic Edition
- Power Adapters
- Crossfire Bridge
- Various Adapters
- PowerDVD
- DVD Suite
- Ruby ROM (Volume 1.1)
- Driver Disc (12-096)
Notice that already you can see the copper heatpipes emerging out of the top of the card.
Inside Box |
Inside of Inside Box |
The Card |
CDs That Come in The Package |
Here is a close up of the parts of the video card. Notice the prominent headpipes on the top; those are indeed made of copper. Another thing I’d like to direct your attention to is how large this card is. I think everyone is familiar with how big a PCI express bus is so use that to gauge its size.
Back of the Card |
Close up of Fan |
Connections to the Card |
Top of the Card |
Installation
Installing a new video card is supposed to be a simple task… supposed to be. I ran into a slew of problems trying to fit my video card into my computer. The problem was two fold:
- Gigabyte placed the SATA connectors on my motherboard in a very poor location.
- Sapphire made the plastic heat sink cover unnecessarily large compounding the previous problem.
Here we see the final install job and a close up of the power connections, notice that it takes a 6 pin and an 8 pin connector. If you look closely below you can see how my SATA ports are now barely usable.
Power Hungry |
Card Installed |
Now let’s go see what GPU-Z says about this video card and establish what driver version I’ll be using for the testing on the later pages.
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