Computers Hardware

Sapphire already announces its own water cooled solution: the HD 2900XT TOXIC edition.

Known for its quality water cooling systems, Sapphire extends the TOXIC family with the addition of ATI’s latest top-of-the-line graphics cards. The Sapphire HD2900XT TOXIC edition includes every feature found on the reference boards: unified shader architecture with 320 shaders, 512-bit memory bus, which delivers over 475 GigaFLOPS performance and 106 GB/sec memory bandwidth, Microsoft DX 10 and Shader model 4.0 support, and of course, the Windows Vista Premium Experience certification.

The HD 2900XT TOXIC is also equipped for the ultimate high definition experience, featuring ATI’s Avivo HD Technology for enhanced video display as well as hardware accelerated decoding of Blu-ray and HD-DVD content. Furthermore, the new TOXIC editions integrate two dual link DVI outputs and the cards are CrossFire Multi-GPU ready. As with the other integrators, Sapphire provides HDMI adapters for users who want to fully benefit from the 5.1 Audio support. All HD 2900XT cards provide true audio and video output via the included HDMI adapter.

Primarily aimed at enthusiasts who need fast but silent solutions, the new SAPPHIRE HD2900 XT TOXIC features a drive-bay mounted water cooling system with integrated reservoir, pump and radiator system. Sapphire even included a second drive-bay in the event of a CossFire setup. This second drive-bay is also compatible with the system CPU and other hardware components, including hard disks. With the inclusion of such water cooling systems, Sapphire encourages overclocking attempts and claims that the HD 2900XT Engine clocks of 750 MHz can be enhanced by over 15%, while memory clocks could be increased well over the 1650 MHz standard ones. [via]

In the weeks to come, Sapphire is expected to announce more mainstream and entry-level graphics cards that feature non-standard cooling systems.