Verdict: Unfortunately this Toxic is not a taste of poison paradise

The initial signs weren't good for the Sapphire X700 Pro Toxic; not only does it employ the X700 Pro GPU, which is inferior to the GeForce 6600 GT, it also has only 128MB of memory - half of what it needs to play Far Cry at a smooth frame rate.

However, if you install the APE software supplied on the driver CD, Sapphire guarantees that the memory will overclock to roughly the same speed as an X700XT. Although the X700XT is no longer available, the promise of a guaranteed overclock is worthy of investigation.

Unfortunately, just like the other X700 Pro cards in this Labs test, the Sapphire is considerably slower than the 6600 GT cards in almost every benchmark. Only having 128MB of RAM also significantly affects its performance in Far Cry, as it runs at half the speed of the 256MB X700 Pro cards. ATi has told us this will be fixed in a new driver release, and we're hoping that this will be the case. After all, 128MB 6600 GT cards suffer from no such problems.

Sapphire has fitted a garish orange Arctic Cooling HSF to the GPU, which takes up two expansion slots, so SFF users need not apply. It's quiet and does an excellent job of keeping the GPU and RAM cool. We're also pleased that Sapphire has managed to come up with a unique way of branding its overclocking-friendly graphics cards. There's no sign of 'extreme' or 'ultra' here at all. If only we could be quite as congratulatory about the card's performance.

With a bit of manual tweaking in Powerstrip we succeeded in raising the GPU from 473MHz to 520MHz, and the RAM from 500MHz to 540MHz (effectively 1.08GHz).

TV-out comes as standard, and high-quality S-Video and composite cables are also included. There are full copies of two games, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, both of which are worth playing. You also get a 6in UV cold cathode which, when placed next to the Toxic, will make it glow prettily.

Unfortunately, even though it's pre-overclocked, much like the HIS card, this is a well-executed product based around an inferior GPU. Only those who crave silence should consider it.

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