Sapphire HD6850 TOXIC Edition Review

Sapphire TOXIC Up Close

The HD6850 TOXIC is a very standard looking card. Nothing particularly impressive stands out about it from a cooling point of view. Indeed you’d be forgiven for wondering if it was a special edition at all. Our test sample is a pre-retail one but we’re assured that it’s identical in every way to the ones you’ll buy on the shelf with the only difference being that ours came in a plain brown box rather than the full packaging you’d expect.

      

The input end of the card is where the first real changes are to be found. We have a Dual-Link DVI-D, a Single-Link DVI-D, a HDMI 1.4a port and two mini DisplayPorts. The Sapphire HD6850 TOXIC is certainly awash with connectivity options.

Speaking of which Sapphire haven’t been stingy with the accessories either. Besides the standard power cables and adaptors, we have a HDMI 1.4 cable supplied too, which is a nice touch.

      

The rear of the card hints that something special is going on, with plenty of solder covering seemingly every available gap. A close-up of the area surrounding the GPU itself shows the quality that’s typical of the high-end Sapphire cards.

In fact we’d go so far as to say this is a 6870 PCB with the relative power phases, just using a 6850 GPU.