Sapphire Radeon R9-280X Toxic

A Closer Look at the Sapphire Radeon R9-280X Toxic

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The packaging for the Sapphire card is a spotUV type packaging which makes for a cool iridescent effect which is covered on the front by a robot like soldier and adorned by a few key feature icons. The rear of the box covers key features and also showcases the special cooling design employed on the Sapphire 280X Toxic.

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Here we see the accessory pack which includes a Mini Displayport to Displayport Adapter, dual power adapters, HDMI cable and even a crossfire bridge. Also the inclusion of a driver disc and user manuals. All of this is more than enough to get you running and even an included HDMI cable which is always nice in case you dont happen to have one on hand.

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The card itself really is good looking with its triple fan cooler in place and the black/orange color scheme holds up really well to the high performance image. The two outward fans are slightly larger while the inboard center fan is smaller and they all work in conjunction with eachother.

The backplate is in place covering most of the PCB with only small cutouts for key components such as the Black Diamond Chokes as you can see near the far end of the card.

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The display connectivity is about standard for what we have seen on the Kepler based lineup

• 2x DVI
• 1x HDMI
• 2x Mini-Displayport

This all digital connector arrangement allows for a multitude of displays in pretty much any connector mix you could chose to employ, and I do like that sapphire chose to employ Dual DVI connectors which allows for most standard displays without adapters to be used.

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Here you see that the custom PCB Sapphire 280x Toxic which utilizes dual 8 pin PCIe connectors to ensure plenty of power delivery even under the most extensive and strenuous loading conditions.

The Dual Crossfire bridge connectors allow for up to 4 Way GPU configurations for extreme gaming of benchmarking builds to ensure you can push the highest graphics performance possible from your rig.

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Stripping the cooler from the Toxic card you can see it is one massive piece. The base plate which contacts the GPU is a solid copper piece which is met from within by multiple Heatpipes to ensure fast transfer of heat away from the GPU into the cooling fin array.

the card you can see still has many parts needed to be removed such as the two VRM coolers. and also the backplate which mounts with screws from the front of the PCB into the backplate.

Once the backplate is removed you can see that there is a thermal pad which contacts some small VRM components on the rear of the PCB.

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The VRM you can see has top choice components including Black Diamond Choke/Inductor pieces which I thought were kinda cool when I saw the Sapphire logo printed on them as most people wont see this but its just a small detail that when noticed I thought was kinda cool.

the far edge fo the card you will find the dual Fan headers, now I can only assume that in order to keep from overloading the fan header units they split the load to a second header as the Toxic card operates under a single fan controller from what I can tell.

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The Sapphire Radeon R9-280X Toxic utilizes a Tahiti GPU exactly as we saw on 7970GHz edition cards but being a Toxic model I have a funny feeling there is some special binning in place due to the very high out of the box clocks utilized on this model.

The Sapphire Press button is used to switch between two BIOS Roms much like the toggle we have seen on other Radeon model cards. This switch allows toggling between the standard BIOS Rom or the UEFI Rom.