The Sapphire TOXIC Radeon HD 5970 GDDR5 PCIE video card is based upon AMD's Hemlock chip. This chip is nearly identical to the HD 5870 in terms of specifications except there are two of them on the card and the reference HD 5970 chips are clocked at 725MHz instead of the 850MHz reference clock for the HD 5870.

Each of the two chips on the board has 2.15 billion transistors manufactured on TSMC's 40nm fabrication process. AMD has been at the forefront of smaller fabrication process on video cards with the first 90nm chip, the first 65nm chip, the first 55nm chip and the first 40nm chip. Each of the two chips has 1600 Stream Processors, which is double that of the HD 5870.

Sapphire bills this card as the World's Fastest Graphics Card and with this I agree 100% as the card is overclocked by 175MHz for the core and 200MHz for the memory over the standard HD 5970 which is already a very high performer. The card is faster in every single benchmark except for 3DMark Vantage which is an anomaly. The game plays every game without significant drops in performance across all platforms including DirectX 11 games. If you want the fastest card regardless of the cost the SAPPHIRE TOXIC RADEON HD 5970 4GB GDDR5 PCIE is it bar none. The inclusion of two games COD MW2 and Dirt 2 are a value addition to an already impressive bundle. Sapphire deserves an Editor's Choice award for all of these and other reasons outlined in the rest of the review.