Card Layout and Photos

Well first thing is first, I can’t tell if orange is starting to get popular or if some of these companies are just pandering to my love of the color. It’s no surprise that I love the look of the Sapphire Toxic R9 270X, but it’s more than just the color. If they did this same fan shroud design in blue for example it would be just as eye catching. The multiple piece fan shroud design has another benefit as well, if you want to get the card to match your build you could repaint the orange part whatever color you wanted. The second thing that I wanted to point out right away with the Sapphire Toxic R9 270X is its length. I thought the Gigabyte card was long yet Sapphire managed to make this card even longer! Part of that is just packing in three fans and in this case also leaving a little room in between each fan as well.

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When you peak on the underside of the Toxic you can see more of its heatsink design. The build in heatpipe isn’t visible here as it just circles through the heatsink itself, but you can see what looks like a vapor chamber over top of the GPU itself with the heatpipe coming out from there.

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Up on the top edge of the Toxic Sapphire has cut out the Sapphire logo out of the black part of the fan shroud. Under that they have also built in lighting (that you will see farther down this page). The same cutout can also be found on the underside of the card as well, because they use the same piece on both sides to keep costs down.

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For power, the Toxic doesn’t change anything up from other R9 270X’s. It still requires two six pin power connections to power everything. The space between the heatsink/shroud is a little tight but it shouldn’t make unhooking those power connections difficult.

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Unlike our other R9 270X’s the Toxic has two Crossfire bridge connections. I’m not sure if this means the card will support triple Crossfire, but I have a feeling it won’t. I suspect they are sharing this same PCB with the R9 780X and this is just a quirk of that configuration, but I can’t confirm that.

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Next to the crossfire connections Sapphire also slipped in a small button with their logo on it. After asking around I found out this buttons switches the card from BIOS to UEFI. This will turn on UEFI specific features like windows 8 fast booting assuming you have a UEFI motherboard as well.

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For connections on the Sapphire Toxic R9 270X you get a full sized display port, full sized HDMI, and two DVI connections. The white DVI supports VGA pass-through while the black one does not for those of you who still need a VGA connection. For ventilation Sapphire went with a design similar to what you see from EVGA with its high flow PCI plates, the metal between each slot isn’t very thick at all.

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I was already really impressed with the Toxic’s design but when I flipped the card over to find a full backplate I was ecstatic. The striped design on the backplate is sharp as well but it’s great to see Sapphire going above and beyond to both protect the card as well as add to its already good styling.

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I mentioned the Sapphire logo before, but I also wanted to show off what it looks like when everything is powered up. Sapphire has it glowing with a yellow color. It looks great in person especially, this is much better than the stick on Sapphire logos I have seen them use in the past on some cards.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33119 11 Oct 2013 13:31
Happy Friday everyone! Today I have a review of Sapphires flagship R9 270X called the Toxic. Enjoy

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