The Toxic sheds its skin
They say that some things are better left up to the imagination, but the Toxic's internals are not.
The cooler looks much better naked, where it reveals its radiator, pump, and reservoir in all their glory. We can't believe that someone at Sapphire decided a big, black sticker looked better than this. Considering how easy the sticker was to remove, it's not like it was doing a very good job of protecting design secrets, either.
Zooming in on the back end of the cooler, we get a good view of the pump and reservoir. Users can top off the reservoir via the screw cap over to the right, and it's actually possible to read the fluid level without removing the sticker.
Note that the Toxic's plumbing is a mix of copper pipe and black hose, both of which are carefully routed within the cooler's limited internal volume. The hose is actually stamped with Thermaltake's name, suggesting the cooler is a derivative of that company's Tide Water design.
Thermaltake's current Tide Water graphics coolers use double-wide cooling units, but the Toxic's cooler squeezes everything into a single slot. Radiator fins are located at the rear, where an integrated cooling fan and PCI back plate vents provide airflow. Two fan speeds are available, and users can toggle between them using a switch on top of the cooler. Unfortunately, that switch isn't easily accessible from outside the case. It might have been better located on the PCI back plate.
While we're making suggestions, it would have been even better if the fan's speed were dictated by the Radeon X1900 XTX itself. The card already supports temperature-based fan speed control for its default air cooler, so the capacity exists to automatically adjust fan speeds based on GPU demands. As it stands, the Toxic's fan is powered separately via a four-pin Molex connector that also runs the cooling unit's pump.
Given the fact that the Toxic pushes liquid around inside of one's PC, warranty coverage is especially important. Sapphire covers the card for two years, which is pretty average considering the recent popularity of lifetime graphics card warranties. Of course, that doesn't mean the Toxic will start springing leaks two years down the road. The cooler's build quality appears to be solid, and we didn't notice any irregularities or potential issues during our testing.
Just enough extras
High-end graphics cards generally come with more extra goodies than mid-range cards, and the Toxic doesn't disappoint.
Sapphire throws a full array of extras into the box, including standard and high-definition output dongles, composite and S-Video cables, and a pair of DVI-to-VGA adapters. A PCI Express power adapter is also included for those with older power supplies.
On the software front, the card comes with CyberLink's PowerDVD 6 and PowerDirector 4 DE in addition to a handful of trial applications. A number of game options are also included via a "Sapphire Select" DVD. The DVD contains locked versions of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, Richard Burns Rally, and Tony Hawk's Underground 2. Users are free to play trial versions of each, and are also given a couple of coupon codes that can be used to unlock any two games. The unlocked games can be installed up to three times without any additional charges, although you'll have to activate the games over the Internet with each install.
None of Sapphire Select's current game options are cutting-edge titles, but it's nice to have a choice between them, especially since there's some genre variety in what's available. Far too often we see cards bundled with a single game we've already played, already own, or have no interest in anyway.
