Video cards have come a long way over the past couple years. Their ever increasing performance has to meet the needs of the everyone from the work station user to the high end gamer. This card from Sapphire is aimed squarely at the latter segment of the market. As games become more graphically demanding and with people moving to ever larger resolutions, you need to have the hardware that can handle the load. The HD 5870 is a proven performer in its own right as shown in countless reviews and feedback in forums across the web. With this kind of buzz the only thing left to do is improve upon a proven commodity. This is something Sapphire does and does quite well as seen in the past with their Atomic, Vapor-X and Toxic versions of some of ATIs best products.For the Sapphire Toxic HD 5870 2GB card, Sapphire has bumped up the clock speeds on the Cypress core and increased the amount of frame buffer memory to 2GB (from the standard 1GB), in addition to a slight bump in clock speedto 1225Mhz. Instead of using the reference cooling solution, Sapphire has equipped this Toxic Edition overclocked card with its proprietary Vapor-X cooling to keep the thermals in check. All this combines to give the consumer another option for increased performance. Lets face it, not everyone likes to tinker with the workings of a video card for more performance, these people just to want to pop in the video card and start fraggin'. Lets see how the Toxic Edition HD 5870 2GB card performs. From the specs alone it looks as though it may jump up a little closer to Nvidias latest, the GTX 480.