Introduction:
It wouldn't be out of line to say that EA's Battlefield 3, released only a couple of weeks ago, was one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the whole year. Almost everyone who has played it, including myself, has fallen in love and has since forgotten about all the other games that they used to play up until its release. I must say that the multiplayer gameplay is phenomenal and offers infinite incentives to keep playing — especially with a good group of teammates. However, that's not the focus of this review; it is merely a small part of it. On the day that Battlefield 3 launched came Sapphire's HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 Edition. Now, the only thing that makes it the Battlefield 3 Edition is that retail copies of the card come with a registration key for the game. Of course, the cost of the game is going to be a part of the package, but it still offers incentive to those looking for a new card and were going to purchase the game anyways.As I've stated in my recent reviews of Sapphire cards, these cards are not anything new at the base/hardware level. Sure, they may come with different coolers, clock speeds, port availabilities, etc., but at the core they are the same. Sapphire has been keeping the market busy with many different varieties of the HD series cards, mainly in the 6800 and 6900 flavors. The HD 6970 is a very powerful card and I thoroughly enjoy my own. I am looking forward to seeing how this card compares to other HD 6970s and seeing how far I can overclock it! In this review, I will provide a thorough evaluation of Sapphire's HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 Edition, including its unboxing, exterior and interior evaluation, specifications and features, and OCC's intense testing and benchmarking suite that will put it up against the latest of games and highest of stress levels.
Closer Look:
Covering the package from top to bottom is Battlefield 3 artwork. The front of the box features the same image as everywhere else Battlefield 3 is advertised; an armored soldier walking toward the field of view with a tank and other buildings behind him. All the individual features that the card offers and other specifications are displayed on the front of the box as well. There is an "Overclocked" stamp indicating that it runs at slightly higher speeds than reference clocks, a Dual-Bios icon, and more at the bottom that are general features, such as DX11, HDMI and DisplayPort support, and other AMD features like Eyefinity and CrossFire. The top, bottom, and sides all say "Radeon HD6970 FleX Edition", with the graphics from the front wrapping onto them. The rear of the box mainly goes into detail about the individual features that are listed in icon form on the lower-front of the box, some of which I listed above. Inside of the outer, decorated "sheath" is a plain cardboard box that houses the card and the accessory contents.
The card itself is protected inside of a taped-shut, anti-static bag and arrived in good condition. Underneath the recycled cardboard housing for the video card is another cardboard box that contains the accessories. These accessories include: CrossFire bridge, HDMI to DVI adapter, mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter, 6' HDMI cable, driver CD, users manuals, and of course, a Battlefield 3 voucher.
Closer Look:
As with the other special edition Sapphire cards, there is generally no reference to the game/etc that the card represents on the card itself, possibly to protect the zeitgeist of the card and not leave it stuck at a potential date/landmark in time or make it appear gimmicky. As such, the Sapphire HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 edition does not have any Battlefield 3 logo or propaganda attached to it physically — it's the fact that it is packaged with the game itself. Anyways, on the top/front of the card we see the AMD logo to the left of the text "Radeon HD 6970" to identify the card. On the other side of the fan is the text "FleX edition", reminding the user of the card's capability to use a combination of three monitors using the two DVI ports and the HDMI port. On non-FleX cards, you cannot use the HDMI port and Single Link DVI port independently. The cooling shroud is composed of black plastic, and offers a neat, rugged look due to its shape, textures, and pattern. Taking a look at the back side of the card will expose the signature blue Sapphire PCB. Nothing particular stands out from the back side, other than the visibility of the PCI slot contacts and the two CrossFire notches at the top. Having two CrossFire notches means that the card is capable of running a triple-card setup.
On the mounting bracket side of the card you will find the two DVI ports (Dual Link and Single Link), one HDMI port, and the two DisplayPort jacks. In total, this card is capable of driving five monitors, more than most other cards can handle (at least those without a separate clock generator on the HDMI port). With the amount of ports taking up the majority of the space on the backplate, little room is left for the exhaust vents. Most cards are limited in this way, but do not have any issues with cooling. Peering at the opposite side of the card under the cooling shroud, you can see some of the capacitors on the board, the outside of the power ports (one 2x2-pin plug and one 2x3-pin plug is required), the fan header on the PCB, and some small heatsinks toward the edge of the PCB. You can also see some of the fins on the outside of the heatsink. Rotating to the front side of the card, a good look at the location of the power plugs can be made on the right side, along with the CrossFire plugs on the far left of the card. Similar to other Sapphire offerings in the HD 69x0 line, there is a dual-BIOS switch to the right of the CrossFire area that allows users to switch between different BIOS images, if they require. This is particularly handy because if a BIOS flash goes bad, a user can jump over to the redundant version to resolve the problem.
Getting under the hood of this card requires removal of nine screws from the back of the board. Taking a quick glance at the hole and component layout, I can tell that it is AMD's newer reference design, which has a slightly different hole pattern from the original, R1 reference version. All that can be seen on the underside of the cooler is the copper area surrounded by an aluminum mounting mechanism. The copper area is the technology deemed VaporX — a vapor chamber that resembles a 2D heatpipe, or for lack of a better word, a "heatplate". Spreading out of the vapor chamber are three generic, one-dimensional heatpipes that branch out to the aluminum fin array. Removing the cooling shroud exposes its general simplicity, just like the other VaporX units.
As you'll find on the next page in the Specifications table, the HD 6970 is based off of the 40nm Cayman architecture. It sports a 389mm2 die with 2.64 billion transistors, 1536 Stream processors, 96 texture units, and 32 ROPs, with clock speeds of 930MHz (versus 880MHz stock) on the core and 1375MHz on the GDDR5 memory. Seen on this unit is Hynix memory, a top pick among memory chips over many different manufacturers nowadays.
Specifications:
GPU
|
HD6970
|
GPU Core
|
Cayman
|
Technology
|
40nm
|
Die Size
|
389mm2
|
Transistor Count
|
2640 Million
|
ROPs
|
32
|
Shaders
|
1536 Unified
|
Pixel Fillrate
|
29.8 GPixel/s
|
Texture Fillrate
|
89.3 Gtexel/s
|
Memory Type
|
GDDR5
|
Bus Width
|
256-bit
|
Memory Size
|
2048MB
|
Bandwidth
|
176.0 GB/s
|
GPU Core Clock
|
930 MHz
|
Memory Clock
|
1375 MHz
|
DirectX Support
|
11.0
|
Shader Model Support
|
5.0
|
Features:
- Dual-Link DVI
- Equipped with the most popular Dual Link DVI (Digital Visual Interface), this card is able to display ultra high resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 at 60Hz.
- HDMI 1.4a
- HDMI 1.4a builds on previous generations of HDMI connectivity with support for Deep Color, 7.1 High Bitrate Audio, and 3D Stereoscopic support, ensuring the highest quality Blu-ray and video experience possible from your PC.
- Mini-DisplayPort
- Enjoy the benefits of the latest generation display interface, DisplayPort. With the ultra high HD resolution of 2560 x 1600 the graphics card ensures that you are able to support the latest generation of LCD monitors.
- Single-Link DVI-D
- Supports Digital monitors up to 1920x1200 resolution.
- DisplayPort 1.2
- Doubling the effective bandwidth of previous DisplayPort implementations, DisplayPort 1.2 now includes support for Multi-Stream, allowing you to drive up to four separate monitors from a single DisplayPort 1.2 connector (requires DP1.2 monitors or Multi-Stream compatible hub), Stereoscopic 3D monitor support and adds support for high quality, lossless, 7.1 channel audio formats.
- Advanced GDDR5 Memorty Technology
- GDDR5 memory provides twice the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3 memory, delivering more speed and higher bandwidth.
- AMD Eyefinity
- AMD Eyefinity technology maximises your field of view across up to three displays, fully engaging your peripheral vision. For gamers this puts you right IN the game and for other applications it helps to increase productivity by maximising your visual workspace so that you can see more windows simultaneously. AMD Eyefinity technology is also ideal for multimedia applications as it allows you to keep several ‘palettes’ or ‘panels’ open over a larger workspace whist you edit your images or videos.
- Vapor-X Technology
- SAPPHIRE’s innovative Vapor-X cooling technology allows products to run not only cooler but also much quieter. A Vapor-X product means a virtually silent gaming experience and more headroom to explore performance tweaking !
- 40nm Process Technology
- Cutting edge manufacturing process allows for efficient, high performance parts which use less power than their predecessors.
- AMD CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology
- Triple or Quadruple gaming power with AMD CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology.AMD CrossFireX technology supports up to four graphics cards to be used in a single system.
- PCI-Express 2.0
- The latest PCI-Express 2.0 specification doubles data throughput from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps allowing you to exploit the full performance potential of your graphics card.
- Microsoft DirectX 11
- Get intense gaming performance and unrivalled image quality with stunning 3D visual effects, realistic lighting and lifelike imagery with SAPPHIRE graphics cards supporting DirectX®11. New features in DirectX®11 such as Hardware Tesselation, HDR Texture Compression, Multi-threading support and DirectCompute bring lifelike gaming and an experience never possible on a PC before.
- OpenGL 4.1
- Supports the latest OpenGL API (Application Programming Interface) to accelerate performance of applications outside of DirectX®, i.e. Adobe Autodesk 2D/3D graphic design.
- Shader Model 5.0
- Supports the latest Shader Model 5.0 feature set including VTF (Vertex Texture Fetch) which is a key feature used extensively in many of the games that ship today. Without support for this feature the game will fall back to a lesser shader path resulting in the loss of cool, lifelike effects made possible by Shader Model 5.0
- AMD Catalyst Control Center
- The AMD Catalyst Control Center™ software application gives you complete control over the performance and visual quality of your SAPPHIRE AMD Radeon™ based graphics card allowing for the best experience on your PC.
- Dolby TrueHD and DTSHD Master Audio Support
- Support for copy protected, high bandwidth, 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI. Get a fully immersive, high definition audio experience with the latest Blu-ray movies. (Requires a DVI to HDMI dongle on some models, an HD capable monitor and a Blu-ray drive)
- AMD PowerPlay
- Dynamically manage power efficiency and take control of your performance with AMD’s revolutionary AMD PowerPlay TM power management technology delivering high performance features when needed and conserving power when the demand on the graphics processor is low. This seemless technology dramatically reduces the overall power consumption allowing for break-through energy efficiency.
- 4th Generation Tera Scale Engine
- Massive arrays of on-chip compute units offer the latest in graphics functionality and performance allowing you to enjoy what you are watching at the highest quality possible.
- TriXX Untility
- TriXX helps users to get the optimum performance from compatible SAPPHIRE graphics cards in any application by allowing them to monitor, tune and save different settings of key parameters for the card.
- Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3)
- Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p (and beyond !) display resolution. Enjoy a feature rich video experience with enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3), offloading the bulk of the video decoding tasks from the CPU to the GPU allowing for a cooler, quieter and more balanced system.
- Enhanced Internet Browser Applications
- Not just for video and games, the power of your GPU can now accelerate the latest versions of some Internet browsers (IE9/Mozzilla FireFox) utilising Direct 2D rendering for a faster and more responsive browsing experience including high quality image rendering and media playback.
- Microsoft Office 2010
- Take advantage of improved picture and media editing capabilities in Office 2010 as well as edit and share your content in real time.
- Windows 7 support
- WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) Certified drivers and logos are available for all SAPPHIRE HD2000, HD3000, HD4000 and HD5000 series cards ensuring compatibility and reliability with Microsoft Windows 7.
- AMD App Acceleration
- Use the power of your AMD Radeon™ GPU to speed up everyday applications like your web browser and Microsoft Office 2010 using AMD App Acceleration. Do more, and do it faster. Watch Blu-ray movies, online streaming video and other HD content using your AMD Radeon™ GPU and get smooth – high quality playback with amazing image quality.
source:http://www.overclockersclub.com/
