Back at CeBit were Sapphire showed off its overclocked HD 5970 Toxic with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, claiming that it was the fastest graphics card on the planet.

Well, the rabid 5970 is finally here and it seems Sapphire wasn't exaggerating. The card boasts two RV870 GPUs clocked at 900MHz, an impressive 175MHz overclock over the reference card. Furthermore the memory was bumped up from 1000MHz to 1200MHz, allowing for an even higher performance boost. Thanks to the generous overclock, Sapphire had to resort to a massive three-fan, three-slot cooler with a bunch of heatpipes.



The card should deliver 2x28,8 GPix/s, a significant increase over 23,2GPix churned out by a run of the mill HD 5970. The texture fill rate was increased from 2x58GTex/s to 2x72GTex/s.

We're still not sure about the price, but it's clear we're looking at well over €600. The card will also suck a bit more juice than an ordinary HD 5970, as it requires two 8-pin connectors.