Sapphire HD6970 2048MB GDDR5 (Dual Fan Edition) Review

Sapphire love their 3D Rendered babes, and who are we to argue. This time they have opted for well endowed sword wielding Amazon warrior.

Inside the box is a rather impressive bundle, with power and video converter cables, a software disc, Crossfire bridge and some literature on the sapphire range. They also include a quality HDMI cable.

The card features a dual fan, heatpipe cooler, finished in black plastic. It is built around a custom blue PCB design.

It is Crossfire capable in 2,3 and 4 way configurations and requires an 8 pin and a 6 pin power cable for operation.

The I/O plate has two DVI ports, a full sized HDMI port and two mini displayport connectors. There is full multi monitor Eyefinity support with this card. The card still vents hot air out the back of the computer chassis, which is always a bonus.

Sapphire are using Hynix H5GQ2H24MFA memory, which has proved to overclock well for us in the past, so we will be interested to see how far we can push this particular board later in the review.

Sapphire haven't cut any corners with this card, using a pure copper base with five thick heatpipes. These pass out into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core.

An overview of the HD6970, which we have seen many times before. It is based on the 40nm Cayman core, which has 1536 Unified Shaders and 32 ROPS. There is 2GB of GDDR5 memory onboard which is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. Core clock speed is 880mhz, and the memory operates at 1,375mhz (5,500mhz effective).

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