Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Edition 3GB Review

A Closer Look

The cooler as we already mentioned is Sapphire’s Tri-X design which features two 8mm heat pipes, two 6mm heat pipes and a single 10mm “superpipe”. The fans, left to right, are sized at 100mm, 70mm and 100mm respectively.

The back of the Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Edition has a rather suave looking backplate that adds to the rigidity and aesthetics of the design.

The Sapphire R9 280X Toxic is a real beast in length. Sapphire have chosen to keep the card at a two slot thickness and as a result the length has been increased to make room for the massive cooling it needs. The total length is about 12.25 inches or 31.5 centimeters.

Due to the massive overclock, and the massive overclocking headroom, the Sapphire Toxic R9 280X needs dual 8 pins for power delivery.

It has dual CrossFire X connectors for up to 4 way CFX. There’s also a dual BIOS button to switch between conventional and UEFI BIOS modes. Both BIOSes have the same clock settings.

The bottom is an open design. Interestingly the card seems to be slightly bent/skewed under the weight or pressure of the rather large cooling solution.

The end is also an open-venting design and you can see that huge 10mm heatpipe coming down the middle.

Display ports include dual mini Display Port, HDMI and dual DVI (the white DVI port supports DVI to VGA conversion). With an MST Hub Eyefinity 6 is fully supported.