Sapphire prepping Vapor-X and TOXIC AMD Radeon HD 6870s

To try and keep some interest lingering with AMD with the launch of NVIDIA’s GTX 560, their partners, Sapphire have been hard at work with a pair of Radeon HD 6870’s and a HD 6970.

Firstly, the 6870’s have been given the standard Vapor-X treatment which is the company’s custom vapour-chamber cooler which is extremely powerful and efficient. This has also been combined with a custom PCB and a 10-phase power controller, as well as Sapphire’s custom Black Diamond chokes. This should enable the board to overclock quite nicely.

However, the standard Vapor-X card does not come overclocked and will ship with the standard 900 MHz core and 4,200 MHz memory clocks. It does though, come with Sapphires Trixx software which should make the manual overclock that bit easier.

If your not that confident with the process of overclocking, or just don’t want to risk it, then they are also releasing a Toxic model which has been overclocked up to 970 MHz and a cool 4,600 MHz memory clock.

Moving onto the HD 6970 which Sapphire have seemingly customised with a turn-key mechanism built-in. This is most likely for One-touch overclocking or it could be to access the secondary bios. There have been no other details of this customisation yet, other than the turn-key it looks pretty similar to the reference design, so we will have to wait and see.