Sapphire HD7950 Dual-X FleX Edition Review (OC)

The Sapphire HD7950 Dual-X FleX Edition really is a monster card, ideal for an enthusiast user who wants to build a new rig to play the latest games in Eyefinity. We also feel it will be perfectly suited for a professional user who wants to power three or more high resolution screens … for rendering, video production or photo editing in Adobe Photoshop.

With FleX technology, there is no need to spend extra for a Displayport screen, if you only want to run in a 3-way configuration. There is no demand for an active adapter, and the HDMI to DVI cable for the third screen is included in the box.

The HD7970 FleX should really be paired up with a fast, overclocked Core i5 or Core i7 processor and plenty of fast DDR3 memory. An enthusiast user could work on this system across three screens during the day reaping the benefits of the improved 7 series idle state, which demands very little power at the socket.

Then when it is time to blow off some steam, the latest games could be enjoyed across three 24 inch screens at 5760×1080. We highlighted today that the HD7950 Dual-X FleX Edition has enough horsepower to handle demanding titles such as Battlefield 3 and the latest Dirt Showdown racing game.

Sapphire deserve credit for their cooling implementation which maintains the high standards they have set for themselves during 2012. Even when tasked with demanding Direct X 11 games, the card is barely audible inside a chassis, enhancing the recommendation for a number crunching ‘jack of all trades' system build.

If the out of the box performance isn't enough then we found that there was plenty of headroom on both core and memory. We managed to increase the core clock from 860mhz to 1039mhz, which increased the overall performance by a noticeable margin. In 3Dmark 11 for instance, the Sapphire HD7950 Dual-X FleX Edition managed to outperform the reference clocked AMD HD7970, which currently demands a considerable price premium.

We have no pricing information yet, but the HD7950 FleX should be available shortly from etailers online. We would expect this card to demand a price premium over a reference HD7950, but as long as Sapphire manage to keep it around the £350-£365 price point it should sell well.

Pros:

• Very quiet.
• supplied overclocked.
• will overclock to 1000mhz+ with Sapphire's TriXX tool.
• faster than reference HD7970 when we overclocked it to the limits.
• cheapest way to set up a three screen DVI Eyefinity system.
• Can handle many engines at 5760×1080 without the need for another card.

Cons:

• No shortage of competition for Sapphire at this price point.

Kitguru says: Another fantastic card from the leading AMD partner.

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