Sapphire first introduced a Toxic version of its Radeon HD 4870 graphics card in September 2008, but as the 1GB version of the HD 4870 hadn't been launched by AMD at that point, we gave it a miss; once the 4870 1GB it quickly became our enthusiast graphics card of choice.Despite the strength of the 1GB card, it wasn't all plain sailing for AMD – the graphics card market has been an incredibly volatile place for the past six months or so and the two rivals have traded blow after blow in a fight for supremacy. It has been a great spectacle and we thought AMD had wrapped up the year, leaving Nvidia festering in the shadows.
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But then Nvidia released its 180 series drivers, which brought significant performance improvements and put the GeForce GTX 260-216 on a level playing field with the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. To make its card even more enticing, Nvidia lowered the price of the GT200 chips it was supplying to partners, enabling them to in turn bring their prices down to a more aggressive level to take the fight to AMD. The GeForce GTX 260-216 ended the year coming out on top as our preference in the all-important enthusiast segment.Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic graphics card utilizes Vapor-X, the vapour chamber cooling technology the company pioneered. Vapor-X was first introduced with the Radeon HD 3870 Atomic as part of a single-slot cooler that was quieter and better-performing than the stock, dual-slot cooler – we liked it so much that it made our list of great innovations in 2008.The cooler on the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic unfortunately isn't a single-slot model, but it's still one of the quietest graphics card coolers we've tested to date – and it was incredibly efficient as well. Even when the card is fully loaded, there's no sign of it ever approaching the levels of annoyance we were subjected to with Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 – it's exactly what the doctor ordered.
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This is down to the Vapor-X technology employed by Sapphire and regular readers will know how it works, but for those that don't here's a quick summary. It shares some similarities with traditional heatpipe cooling technology in that the primary goal is to move heat away from the source as quick as possible. Vapor-X achieves this by using a sealed chamber with a very low air pressure inside. The inside walls of the chamber are lined with a vaporisation wick that is saturated with pure water and, as the chamber heats up, the water heats up and vaporises. This process causes it to move around the chamber until it hits the condensation wick – the coolest area in the chamber, as it's the surface that comes into direct contact with the chamber's top cover. Once the vapour hits this, it condenses as it's cooled and changes state back to water – the heat is transferred away to the array of heatsink fins.Sadly, the improved cooling solution hasn't translated into a stupendously high overclock. The 780MHz core speed is very conservative, while the memory on the card is running at its rated speed. This should mean there's a lot of untapped potential in this card. Had the company launched this product at a time when every penny counts, we're sure that the clock speeds would have been pushed higher. This approach has an impact on yields though – that's not ideal at the best of times and certainly not when we're in a recession.
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The bundle is comprehensive and includes a wide selection of cables and software. There’s a couple of molex to 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors, a component cable, a composite converter, a DVI to VGA adapter and a DVI to HDMI dongle in addition to the obligatory CrossFire bridge. On the software front, there’s a retail copy of 3DMark Vantage, a selection of Cyberlink programs including PowerDVD and DVD Suite, a Ruby ROM disc and a driver/utility DVD. To finish off what is a pretty comprehensive bundle, Sapphire has added a manual and a Sapphire case badge.
Warranty
The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic comes complete with a two-year warranty that includes cover for parts and labour. During the first year of the product’s life, your point of contact should be the retailer. However, if you’re having problems getting hold of the retailer (or the retailer goes out of business), you should contact Sapphire’s support team directly. During the second year of the warranty period, you should talk directly with Sapphire.
Intel's new graphics design is quite a different beast from its previous efforts. For a start, we now have a single, monolithic chip design with the graphics and CPU portions on the same silicon, as well as a brand new internal ring bus, enabling the graphics core to share a portion of the CPU's ultra low latency L3 cache. It also has far more memory bandwidth, not to mention faster direct CPU access, because we've finally lost the antique front side bus. Even Clarkdale had a limited, fixed front side bus system between the CPU cores and the separate die containing the graphics, memory and PCI-E controllers.
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Not only that, but the core frequency of Sandy Bridge's graphics system is higher than ever at 850MHz, and you can use TurboBoost to push this up to 1,100MHz on the Core i5-2500K, and 1,350MHz on the Core i7-2600K. DirectX support has also been updated to version 10.1 from 10.0, and there's naturally support for DisplayPort and DVI too, with the latter finally being updated to the dual-link standard. Similarly, HDMI support has been updated to 1.4a as well, which includes support for 120Hz 3D Blu-ray movies on top of all the features from previous HDMI standard, including picture-in-picture, bit-streaming audio and dual audio streams, 24Hz support and the usual ClearVideoHD de-interlacing. The graphics system also enables two digital outputs to be used simultaneously.
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However, as with Intel's GMA HD system, not every Sandy Bridge desktop CPU features the same level of power. In fact, the Core i5-2500K and i7-2600K are the only desktop CPUs that feature the full count of12 EU graphics cores. It's also worth noting that you can't use the graphics core for video transcoding if you have a discrete graphics card installed either, as there's no way of switching between graphics systems.Conversely, all the new mobile Sandy Bridge parts pack in the full count of 12 EUs, which means that all future Sandy Bridge laptops will get a healthy dose of graphics performance.Finally, it's worth mentioning which motherboard chipsets support the new technology, which include the H67 H61 and the future Z67 PCH chips, although the budget-end H61 won't allow you to overclock the graphics processor. Current H67 boards on the market feature options for increasing the clock speed of the System Agent die-area that houses the processor's graphics system, as well as enabling you to tweak the voltage applied to it.
The T-Balancer range of fan controllers by mCubed has a rather well-earned reputation of being conceptually excellent but hideously complex and uncompromising pieces of kit. We’ve had to grapple with them on more than one occasion before, and we’ve always come away with the impression that we could get so much more out of them if it they were just a little more user-friendly. Still, we like a challenge, so here we are taking a look at the most junior of the T-Balancer series - the miniNG.The miniNG is a dual-channel fan controller that can support a maximum power draw of up to 100W. That might sound ludicrous, especially given that a regular fan only draws about 4W, but it means the miniNG has the ability to power a 12V water pump in addition to your case fans. It also means that there's plenty of scope for using splitter cables to connect multiple fans to each of the channels.Controlling the fan channels are two analogue temperature probes which are supplied with the miniNG. The wires for the probes are a generous 80cm in length, meaning you shouldn’t have any problem reaching even the most remote nook of your case. Some manilla-backed double-sided tape is supplied for attaching the probes, but we can’t work out why you’d use it as you'd never place the probe between a chip and heatsink - the probe is too thick and will negate the usefulness of the heatsink. Strong, clear, single-sided tape would have been a better addition.
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The controller itself is tiny; measuring only 60 x 50 x 16mm in size, it’s barely bigger than a Zippo lighter. This makes it easy to secrete inside your case, and two Velcro patches are supplied for mounting the unit. The PCB is sat snugly in a sturdy metal heatsink and covered by a well-fitted Perspex cover; these give the unit a pleasing feeling of quality engineering.The PCB houses the molex power connector (white), the two 3-pin fan connectors and two blue, adjustable potentiometers. Also on the PCB are a long bank of pins used to adjust the settings of the miniNG, and a smaller bank that allows the controller to be connected to one of the full-size T-Balancers. Doing this slaves the two channels of the miniNG to the larger T-Balancer, essentially adding two extra fan and sensor channels to it.You may notice that the miniNG doesn’t have any way of connecting to a PC, and this is because it eschews the usual T-Balancer control GUI in favour of on-board jumpers. This means the miniNG’s settings can be changed when its host PC is powered down but it obviously means that a degree of flexibility is sacrificed.The miniNG has four main modes - Target Temperature, Curve, Step and Manual - which are changed by adding or removing jumpers to the long bank of pins on the PCB. Target Temperature and Manual mode are fairly straightforward, but Curve mode and Step mode are a little more interesting. Curve mode waits until a defined threshold temperature is reached before starting its fans up at 30 per cent speed. Fan speed is then increased along an increasingly steep curve as the temperature rises.
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Step mode on the other hand waits until a given temperature is reached at the associated probe before starting the fans at 60 per cent speed. If temperatures continue to increase then the controller increases the voltage and speeds the fans up to 100 per cent.The blue potentiometers are used to adjust the settings associated with the mode you have set the controller to. In Curve mode for example, twiddling the potentiometer changes the temperature at which the fan-speed curve starts and in Target Temperature mode the potentiometers adjust the target temperature that the miniNG is attempting to achieve. With no digital readout and no connection to a PC though, it can be difficult to know what you’ve set the potentiometers to. The setup guide mentions that the lowest setting is around 30oC and the highest around 70oC but it's still very much a case of trial and error until you get the settings right.The miniNG also allows you to select between an analogue or PWM power supply. Analogue operation should theoretically be quieter but it may mean that the voltage supplied to a fan sometimes slips below what is necessary to keep it running. PWM mode on the other hand supplies power to the fans in pulses and changes the speed of these pulse to adjust the fan's speed. As these pulses are delivered at the full 12V, the fan should keep running, even down to very low speeds. The only disadvantage to this is some fans can emit a strange buzzing noise when fed with voltage in this way.
The Thermaltake Frio ships with a pair of 120mm fans, complete with individual fan-speed controllers. It supports all current CPU sockets, from LGA775 and LGA1366 to Socket AM3, and it certainly feels like a weighty piece of cooling kit.
The fittings and screws for each CPU socket are neatly supplied in individually labelled bags, and there’s also a tube of thermal paste. However, the illustrations for fitting the cooler to an AMD system shows the wrong clips, which could easily confuse you.
The Frio comes with a lot of kit: mounting legs for every socket, plus a second 120mm fan for extra CPU or case cooling. Click to enlarge.
Five 8mm-thick heatpipes emerge from each side of the base, which should increase the cooling power of the Frio, along with its 6mm-thick heatpipes. These copper heatpipes suck heat from the solid nickel-plated contact plate into the bank of aluminium fins, which are thicker than the usual cooling fins we see.
The Thermaltake logo on the top of the cooler indicates which way around it should be fitted, and there are also the usual arrows on the fans to indicate the correct airflow. Each fan also sports a controller, so you can run it at whichever speed you choose; however, we noticed that when we turned the dial to high for one of the fans, the speed actually decreased. Dialling it down a shade solved this fault.
The cooler weighs in at a hefty 1,042g, but once installed, it remained solid whichever mounting we used. Part of the reason for this is that the Frio uses a backplate to mount on every CPU socket. If you don’t have a case with a hole behind the CPU area of its motherboard tray, you’ll need to remove your motherboard
to fit the Frio.
The fans are manually controlled, so you need to find a speed you're happy with and leave them. Click to enlarge.
Another potential issue is that if you use both fans, you’ll need a spare header close to the CPU socket to power the second fan. There are 3-pin splitter cables to help, but these will cost a few extra quid, so it would have been great to see Thermaltake include them in the box.
In each system, the fit of the Frio proved to be snug, with the lower edge of the fan nearly touching either the memory sticks or motherboard heatsinks, so tall memory is out of the question with this cooler. Its bulk also made it tricky to plug in the fans, but other than that there were no issues.
Specifications
- Compatibility: Intel: LGA775, LGA1156, LGA1366. AMD: Socket AM2, AM2+, AM3
- Weight: 1,042g
- Size (mm): 139 x 98 x 165 (W x D x H)
- Fan: 2 x 120mm, manual control, 1,200-2,500rpm
- Stated Noise: 20 - 43dBA
