Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 DiRT3 Toxic Edition

Sapphire HD6950 2GB DiRT3 Toxic Edition Review

Just over a month ago, we reviewed a 2GB HD6950 from Sapphire that included a free copy of Colin McRae's DiRT3, an exciting rally racing game that many love, including me personally. The card did very well in performance, temperature, and power draw, and is still available at that great Sapphire price point — especially coming with a free game. Anyways, we all know that Sapphire, along with every other manufacturer, doesn't like to end its cards in stock form, and that's why we see Sapphire's "Toxic" editions hit the market shortly after the original versions. The "Toxic" edition of the HD6950 enjoys a slight overclock of 80MHz on the core and 50MHz on the memory, bringing the overall speeds up to 880MHz and 1300MHz, respectively. While that may not seem like much of a boost, this small bump in clock speed produces a very noticeable improvement — especially for still being in, more or less, OEM form. Most users will continue to push these cards far past what Sapphire produces and enjoy the challenge of getting the most from their hardware. Sapphire's "Toxic" stamp generally means that the card also gets a different, special edition look than the previous one, along with a different cooling setup as well.