Usually the Toxic name brings with it large clock speed increases and unfortunately, the HD 5870 version seems to buck that trend. Granted, a 75Mhz increase in core speed is impressive but we know many people were hoping to see at least 950Mhz out of this card. That wasnt meant to be due to the fact that it seems more and more of ATIs board partners are reporting poor overclocking potential on newer batches of chips.
As many users have been experiencing with late model HD 5870 cards, overclocking on this particular model wasnt exactly what one would call easy. Pushing the core to 972Mhz isnt bad per se but considering the vocal number of people talking about 1Ghz-clocked HD 5870, were going to tell you not to get your hopes up. We didnt have an issue pushing the core to 1.01Ghz but stability was non-existent.