Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 BFBC2 Vietnam Edition

AMD last month released its flagship single-GPU cards, the Radeon HD 6900 series, which proved to be great competition to NVIDIA’s higher-end offerings. In the end, both AMD and NVIDIA at that point delivered some great options for gamers to spend their hard-earned bucks on. Since that launch, AMD’s cards seem to have been well-received, and we’re sure to soon see the first follow-ups get released.

At the same time as AMD’s launch, Sapphire released two editions of its own Radeon HD 6970’s, both of which feature the Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam first-person shooter included as a voucher. The version we received simply includes the voucher, while the “Special Edition” is packed in an actual suitcase. I haven’t been able to find that version online, so I’m not sure what the price premium is.

Until the Radeon HD 6990 comes along, the HD 6970 2GB remains AMD’s highest-end offering, and as discovered in our launch article, it performs just about the same as NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 570, which for its $370 price tag, is just about right.

As it is today, AMD’s GPU line-up is rather large, although many of the choices don’t make sense with the HD 6800 and HD 6900 series available. Until AMD releases follow-ups for the entire HD 5000 series, those will remain on e-tailers such as Newegg.

Sapphire’s BF2: BC edition might be “special”, but it’s still based on AMD’s reference design. That’s far from being a bad thing, though, as the cooler proved efficient in our launch article and is quiet to boot. For those who enjoy special faces on their cards, this one looks pretty good – as long as you are a Battlefield fan.

Right out of the box, the card can support 2x DVI monitors and also an HDMI. If you happen to have mini-DisplayPorts on your monitor, you could take advantage of those ports as well, or if you have extender docks, you could use an Eyefinity setup with one or both of those ports (for 3 or 6 displays). For a normal Eyefinity configuration, you’ll need to use one of these DisplayPort ports, using a mini-DP to DP adapter, and then use a combination of the HDMI and DVI ports.

Included with the card, but not pictured, is a CrossFireX bridge, a D-Sub adapter, Mini-DP to DP cable, an 8-pin to 4-pin power cable, a 6-pin to 4-pin power cable, a 1.8m HDMI 1.4a cable and also the driver CD.