TOXIC! Ultimate Poison From Sapphire Tech...

[MacClipper]

Just some stuff to whet your appetite for this weekend, introducing fresh poison newly delivered today from Hong Kong...




Card Specifications (click here for details...)

GPU
1100/Boost:1150 MHz Core Clock
28 nm Chip
1280 x Stream Processors

Video Memory
2048 MB Size
256 -bit GDDR5
6000 MHz Effective

Toxicology 101 According to Sapphire



Black Diamond Choke & Full Solid Cap Design

SAPPHIRE Tri-X Cooling Technology

PCB Temperature LED

New!





Positioning




New AMD Branding Explained!





to be contd...

 

[MacClipper]

The R9 Series





New vs Old







POISON -TOXIC

Warning - both are Black & Orange... and very long too!

Sapphire recycles, nice!



...

 

[MacClipper]

The Long Toxic Card


All 308 mm length worth of e-peen... with backplate armour







Just thick enough not to hurt, only dual slot





Needs Dual Supply Juice!





SAPPHIRE Tri-X Cooling Technology - 90 x 80 x 90 mm fans (L to R)







Crossfire Pins & BIOS Button





...

 

[MacClipper]

Day Bling







Night Bling







Counting By Numbers
Card was run at stock clocks, stock cooling, stock local air, benched HWbot style - watch the graphic score mainly

Sapphire Tech R9 270X Toxic With Boost with help from
★ Asrock 990FX Extreme9 | FX-8350@4.5GHz | KVR@1866 | NiCu HK 3.0-GTX360 | Corsair RM850 ★









Battlefield 4 beta HW monitoring with latest 101013 patch (3rd)


...

 

[MacClipper]

Overclocking TriXX?
For the present, attempting to o'c this card is akin to putting the cart before the horse since afaik, none of the usual suspect range of utilities (TriXX, Afterburner etc...) have any proper voltage control over the R9 270X cards. So it looks like meaningful o'cing results will have to wait till the situation pans out, hopefully soon.

Well, TriXX 4.6.0 cheerfully claims the VDDC is already at its max of 1.219V... kaoz klownz.

 

[MacClipper]

Fleshed out a few posts!

 

[MacClipper]

FYI, this card requires a minimum of Catalyst 13.6 WHQL (available from Sapphire download site) or newer to run.

Strangely, the latest official Cat 13.9 WHQL from AMD download site does not recognise the card but the 13.11 beta does.





Edited - changed all 10s to 13s, guess still hung over from testing... lol

 

[fergsu]

FYI, this card requires a minimum of Catalyst 10.6 WHQL (available from Sapphire download site) or newer to run.

Strangely, the latest official Cat 10.9 WHQL from AMD download site does not recognise the card but the 10.11 beta does.

Catalyst 10.6 Err u mean 13.6 right?

Anyway damn confusing series number, and that flashy yellow on the box ... really cannot read the numbers clearly

 

[MacClipper]

Of cos you're right... posted that before coffee.

 

[MacClipper]

More Numbers To Chew On...

3DMark13 Fire Strike Extreme


Cinebench R15




DX11 Game Bench

Metro 2033 Last Light



Batman Arkham City






DX10 Game Bench

RE5 Unofficial HWZ Settings




DX9 Game Bench

Hard Reset





PS: Seems fewer and fewer games (at least, my fave genres) come with built-in benchmarks these days, hmm may be a blessing... spares my smallish SSD. lol


...

 

[MacClipper]

Inadvertently left out some of these shots earlier...


Bundle



Ports



Many Fat Heatpipes (8-10mm)



Backside Measuremet




And I forgot to mention that this card has a beautiful flat BLACK PCB as can be seen from the last shot...

 

[MacClipper]

270X Video Memory - 2GB vs 4GB

Using Battlefield 4 beta Patch 3 (111013) as a guide which is arguably not the best guide since it is only a beta. Still for BF players, this is as good as it gets for now cos the final game is as yet unreleased.

The game at 1200p auto-defaults to High settings for this card. At these settings, Afterburner reports the max video RAM in gaming as ~1.75 GB.





Earlier on, I had tested 1200p at all Ultra settings on the higher end HIS HD7950 3GB card and Afterburner reported the max video RAM in gaming as ~1.89 GB. Hmm, strangely doesn't seem to use much more and still at < 2GB max.





So it looks like 2 GB video RAM is probably sufficient for this card for now, 4 GB video RAM may just be more overkill. Beyond 1200p gaming, you are most likely to need a more robust GPU with more vRAM.

 

[snipes14]

Overclocking TriXX?
For the present, attempting to o'c this card is akin to putting the cart before the horse since afaik, none of the usual suspect range of utilities (TriXX, Afterburner etc...) have any proper voltage control over the R9 270X cards. So it looks like meaningful o'cing results will have to wait till the situation pans out, hopefully soon.

Well, TriXX 4.6.0 cheerfully claims the VDDC is already at its max of 1.219V... kaoz klownz.

Luckily you mentioned this... I like to undervolt everything, and imagine my disappointment when I found I couldn't undervolt my Sapphire 7850... So with regards to the lack of voltage control over the R9 cards, do you think it's because the hardware doesn't support it or the software hasn't been updated to support it yet?

 

[MacClipper]

Heheh, what some other 270X articles say....

Legit Reviews
Hardware.Info

... indicated this will be possible in a future version.

So for now, not yet.

 

[MacClipper]

VDDC - BIOS Control
Fortunately, the present Sapphire card BIOS does do proper CnQ voltage control in idle and load states as can be seen in these following GPU-Z screenshots





In the past, I have come across many factory o'ced cards with subpar programming which lazily keeps the idle voltage stuck at the highest load volts. Well, no undue voltage wear and tear in this card over time.

 

[MacClipper]

Disassembly
Attempted... and abandoned, explained below. Anyway, no real need to do so since the ilde/load temps are crazy low, max < 60C in BF4 beta. lol


Look, no wty stickers over screws!




Yes, they are off!



Yikes, still holding tight and what's this... izit BGA RAM stuck to HSF? OK nvm, mission abort... NG*!



Anyway, decided to take a few more shots since was snooping around the card

LEDs on the back of PCB


VRM sink - properly anchored with screws, note the finned R19 choke


Sapphire customised labeled finned R19 chokes? Fanciful!



Dual PWM Fan Headers




* Reminds me too much of oldtime forumer, rocketman2, who KIA-ed his expensive ATI card eons ago by ripping off the BGA vRAM chip trying to change the HSF and couldn't find anyone to do a reflow.

 

[MacClipper]

IR Readings During BF4 beta Gaming

Back Of GPU Core


VRM Area, Corsair RM850 PSU in background


Main GPU Heatsink




Seems to correlate with Afterburner reporting with all readings < 60C, nice!



...

 

[MacClipper]

ASIC Quality





Hmm 77.9%, not bad at all for ambient users. I like...

 

[MacClipper]

Oh yeah, this is the very card used in the kid's marathon non-stop near 4 hours BF4 beta session last night.

Made the post-exam kiddo a very happy and satisfied (unpaid) Origin beta tester.

 

[bemylove]

good temps with that kind of voltage!

but rather hold back first because no never settle bundle right now.
our distros also a bit chao kuang one, if amd announce never settle for 280x tomorrow, those who bought today sure wont get any back dated bundles.