Board analysis

The Sapphire TOXIC X800 PRO VIVO

Back of the card

The most striking aspect of Sapphire’s TOXIC X800 PRO is undoubtedly its large orange heatsink/fan unit, which is manufactured by cooler manufacturer Arctic Cooling.

Dubbed by Sapphire as “Lethal Cooling”, Arctic Cooling’s VGA Silencer 4 is a very impressive piece of work. Arctic Cooling starts with a copper base plate, which sits at the bottom of the VGA Silencer 4. This copper base draws in heat from the X800 PRO’s R420 VPU, where it’s then transferred to a traditional aluminum heatsink, which is soldered to the copper base plate. This heatsink is tall enough to occupy the PCI slot immediately adjacent to the TOXIC X800 PRO, and sports multiple fins. The copper base also makes direct contact with the TOXIC X800 PRO’s GDDR3 memory modules on the top of the card.

Air comes in here

Air is then forced through the duct...

This copper/aluminum combination does a good job of combating heat, but it wouldn’t be complete without the VGA Silencer 4’s massive cooling fan. Arctic Cooling integrates a large fan on the top of the card, and uses an oversized channel surrounding the card’s fan to draw in as much air as possible. By using a larger fan design, the fan itself can spin at lower RPMs, resulting in less noise than a small, high-RPM fan. The fan is also located offset of the graphics core (actually dangling over the right edge of the board’s PCB) for increased effectiveness. This is the same strategy ATI first employed with their RADEON 9800 XT cooler only it has been executed to a much larger scale with the VGA Silencer 4.

And exits here

Plate cools the memory modules and underside of the card

A plastic, ducted enclosure is then placed on top of the apparatus, which channels air from the VGA Silencer 4’s fan across the copper base and aluminum heatsink, and then out the left end of the duct, effectively outside the system case. While we’re not sold on the orange color Sapphire has selected for the TOXIC’s duct, we can’t deny the effectiveness of the cooler’s results, and in the end that’s all that matters.

In addition, the fan runs nearly silently. In operation the VGA Silencer 4 was barely audible next to the Pentium 4 3.4GHz’s stock cooler, and even in its higher RPM setting it cranks up to under higher temperatures the fan was still quieter than ATI’s stock fan used on their X800 cards.

Finally, a sticker with the blue alien that’s quickly becoming Sapphire’s trademark sits comfortably atop Arctic Cooling’s VGA Silencer 4.