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The HD7950 Dual-X FleX Edition ships in a lovely sunburnt orange coloured box. As would be expected Sapphire have included a 3D rendered image of a woman kitted out in full army gear. The FleX technology gets a high profile mention top right of the box.
The bundle includes a tasty Sapphire sticker, software disc, power and video converter cables and a useful Crossfire connector. There is also a little pamphlet on other products that the company currently sell.
The Sapphire HD7950 FleX Edition features a mean looking black cooler with matching black fans. The white FleX and Dual-X stickers therefore stand out dramatically against the background.
The card is built around a blue PCB and the copper heatpipes are clearly visible running across the full length.
No compromises with this high end solution. It is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. There is also a dual bios switch to maintain a backup if you plan on customising the card.
The Sapphire HD7950 Dual-X Flex Edition demands power from two 6 pin PCI power connectors.
This is a dual slot design with two full sized DVI connectors and a single HDMI port with two mini Display Port connectors. It is Eyefinity capable and can power up to 6 displays. This solution can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. The GPU can support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D.
The FleX Edition has a cooling plate positioned across the VRM's and memory modules. The cooler itself is based around five thick copper heatpipes, which run into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core. The engineering quality is exemplary and the two fans are merged into a single header.
Above, a GPUz overview of the hardware. This highlights the core clock increase from 800mhz to 860mhz over the reference card design. The 3GB of memory is connected via a 384 bit memory interface. The card is equipped with 32 ROPS and 1792 unifed shaders, which is reduced from 2048 on the higher cost HD7970.
