Generally, water cooling has been associated with enthusiasts and hard core overclockers, however, this perception has been changing over the last year or so. Companies like Gigabyte and Thermaltake have “ready-made” water cooling kits that don’t require much skill installing. While these kits don’t necessarily work as well as something put together by the enthusiast, they do get the job done. Today, we’re looking at one such solution- Sapphire’s X1900XTX graphics card which comes water-cooled out of the box.

Sapphire does an excellent job with the packaging of Toxic. Using semi-transparent material, Sapphire creates an effect as though the box is filled with water with the card sitting in the middle. The lower part of the box houses all the cables, connectors, literature and CDs.

Included, you find two DVI-DSUB converters, a composite, an S-Video as well as a Component output cable, a VIVO cable and finally the six pin to molex power cable for the card. Like most Sapphire high-end cards, you can select two games of your choice out of the four bundled which are Tony Hawk's Underground 2, Richard Burn's Rally, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30.

Unlike some other water-cooled graphics cards, Sapphire doesn’t stick the water cooling kit on the graphics card. This allows you to place the graphics card using a single slot in your PCI-E slot while keeping the water cooling kit away from it- maybe towards the last expansion slot.

The Water Cooling kit is specifically designed by Thermaltake for Sapphire and uses a fill Copper block for cooling the GPU. You have two fan speeds on the kit- the higher speed has a setting of 2500RPM while the lower speed works at 2000RPM. The water tank is see-though and the green liquid inside looks cool. There is a place behind the kit that you can refill water in case the level goes down which is measured by a mark on the same side.

When the unit is powered up, it creates a nice looking blue glow. Sapphire takes advantage of the water cooling by having this card overclocked out of the box. While the standard speeds for the x1900XTX are 650MHz/750MHz (Core/Memory), this one is clocked at 675MHz/800MHz.

We used our standard testbed for testing this card out which is made up of an ASUS A8R32 (Crossfire x3200) motherboard, the Athlon64 4800+ CPU and 2x512MB Corsair DDR400 modules running at 2-2-2-5. Lets find out how well this card did compared to the reference ATI x1900XTX as well as some other higher-end cards in singles and dual configurations.