Packaging

The Toxic's packaging isn't unlike many other video card boxes you can pick up these days, with the exception that it holds Sapphire's own customizations. The thing that stands out the most to me is silver avatar, which kind of reminds me a bit of the Silver Surfer from Marvel comics. Below him are the Toxic's main features: PCI-E Version 2, DirectX 10 support, Shader Model 4, HD Video Decoding, and 5.1 Surround Sound.

To the right of the avatar are more features and bundled software, such as Sapphire's Vapor-X technology, a coupon for Valve's Half-Life 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, HDMI Support, and ATI's latest CrossFireX support.

On the rear of the box are descriptions of the various features mentioned on the front, along with a full product description and the box's contents. I hope the card is in this box!

Upon opening the box, I was greeted by some hard foam protecting the card itself. The card is wrapped up in some extra-durable bubble wrap with a sticker warning about proper installation methods.

Under the card were numerous accessories: CrossFire connectors, HDMI adapters and cables, an s-video adapter, component video cables, the instruction manual, and packaged software CD's.

Now it's time to pull the card from it's sheathe and install it in our test system.

Appearance

The Toxic measures up to be almost the same size as the nVidia GeForce 8800GTS at 220mm ×100mm, but is much shorter than the 8800GTS' 33mm height since the HD3870 Toxic only requires a single expansion slot.

The Vapor-X cooler is miniscule in comparison to the dual-slot coolers on competitor's HD3870 models. It's decorated with the Toxic Logo and model number, as well as the Vapor-X technology logo.

The Radeon HD3870 Toxic is powered by a single 6-pin PCI-Express connector, as the power from the PCI-Express x16 slot isn't sufficient.

Next, I look at our test system.