Sapphire renames water-cooled graphics card

Drops 'Blizzard', adopts 'Toxic'

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

21st April 2006 09:36 GMT

Sapphire is to rename its water-cooled ATI Radeon X1900 XTX-based video cards. Out goes the 'Blizzard' moniker, replaced by the less appropriate 'Toxic', the graphics card company announced this week. Britney Spears may like it, we guess...

How come? Sapphire isn't saying, but it's being whispered that games developer Blizzard Software may have had something to do with it, possibly fearing the Sapphire card might be a little too closely associated in the minds of buyers with its own brandname. Maybe - Blizzard hasn't commented on the matter either.

sapphire blizzard radeon x1900 xtx

Sapphire has been touting the ~~Blizzard~~ Toxic card for a few months now, but expects to make the product available to gamers early in May, it said this week. It has also tweaked elements of the design in response to some early reviews, such as Reg Hardware's own.

The card's GPU is clocked to 675MHz while the 512MB of on-board GDDR 3 SDRAM runs at an effective speed of 1.6GHz. The board has twin DVI ports, and video in and out connectors. ®