Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 FleX Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] We took a look at Sapphire's Radeon HD 6870 Vapor-X a couple of weeks ago; a reference-clocked model that aims to deliver far improved cooling and noise-levels and also one that proves a breeze to overclock. Overall, we were quite impressed with Sapphire's offering, even going as far as to award it with one of our Editor's Choice awards. Can the company's "FleX" manage the same? Similar to the Vapor-X, the FleX also comes replete with a custom cooler and in effect aims to deliver better acoustics and temperatures than a reference card can manage, but in addition, it's also designed for those who want to power more than one display, taking full advantage of what AMD's Eyefinity technology has to offer. Sapphire markets the FleX as being built for Eyefinity for a couple of reasons. First, the company includes a couple of adapters in the box that will help make setting up a 3x1 configuration easier. Because the HD 6870 supports just 2 native DVI ports, Sapphire makes it easy to add a third by including an HDMI to DVI passive adapter. "But wait..." you may ask, what about the requirement for a single DisplayPort connection to power any of the available Eyefinity setups? That's the second thing that makes this card special. Rather than bundle in a separate active DisplayPort adapter, Sapphire instead built the card with that functionality built in. In essence, an on-board DisplayPort chip splits off its available bandwidth to two different DVI ports, allowing gamers to hook up one of their DVI monitors using the DVI to HDMI adapter. This implementation without question is a good one, but you may ask why AMD doesn't implement the same kind of functionality for all of its reference cards. Well, I'd say there's one single good reason for it. AMD might be proud of its Eyefinity technology, but it's clear that the number of people who use multiple displays for gaming is painfully low. Thus, it wouldn't have been cost-effective to include what's surely a $10~$15 chip on every single card. Fortunately, for those who could still use that kind of functionality, Sapphire has come to the rescue. Before moving on, let's take a quick look at AMD's current fleet of graphics cards: Model Core MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors Radeon HD 6990 830 1250 4096MB 256-bit 3072 Radeon HD 6970 880 1350 2048MB 256-bit 1536 Radeon HD 6950 800 1250 2048MB 1024MB 256-bit 1408 Radeon HD 6870 900 1050 1024MB 256-bit 1120 Radeon HD 6850 775 1000 1024MB 256-bit 960 Thanks to AMD's big launch of the dual-GPU HD 6990 last week, the table of HD 6000 series cards has grown to five. The HD 6870 we're looking at today still sits nearly at the bottom of AMD's current line-up, but as we've seen in the past, it's far from slow, and given Sapphire's push on its FleX being able to easily power a 3x1 display configuration, that in itself speaks volumes. The FleX's cooler is nearly-identical to the one seen on Sapphire's own Vapor-X, but I tend to like the aesthetics of this one better. But to be fair, it doesn't take much blue to win me over. On the back of the card are 2 x DisplayPort ports, 2 x DVI ports and 1 x HDMI port. For the recommended 3x1 display configuration that Sapphire recommends, both DVI ports and the lone HDMI port would be used. If you don't have a display that includes an HDMI connection, you can rely on the included DVI to HDMI adapter included in the box. The second cable from the right is the included DVI to HDMI cable, while the one to the rightmost point is a 1.8 meter HDMI cable, and the one in the middle a mini-DP to DisplayPort adapter. Also included in the box are 2x 4-pin Molex to 6-pin PCI Express power adapters, a VGA to DVI adapter, a CrossFireX bridge and also a manual and CD-ROM (not pictured). We'll take a quick look at our test system and testing methodology on the following page, and then get started on our results with the help of Colin McRae: Dirt 2. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a detailed look at how we conduct our testing. Test Machine. The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective category on our site for that product. Component Model Processor Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition - Quad-Core @ 4.05GHz - 1.40v Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME - F13j BIOS (08/02/2010) Memory Corsair DOMINATOR - 12GB DDR3-1333 7-7-7-24-1T, 1.60v ATI Graphics Radeon HD 6990 4GB (Reference) - Catalyst 11.4 Beta Radeon HD 6970 2GB CrossFireX (Reference) - Catalyst 10,12 Beta Radeon HD 6950 2GB CrossFireX (Reference) - Catalyst 10.12 Beta Radeon HD 6970 2GB (Reference) - Catalyst 10,12 Beta Radeon HD 6950 2GB (Reference) - Catalyst 11.1 Radeon HD 6950 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 11.1 Radeon HD 6870 1GB (Reference CrossFireX) - Catalyst 10.10 Radeon HD 6850 1GB (Reference CrossFireX) - Catalyst 10.10 Radeon HD 6870 1GB (Sapphire FleX) - Catalyst 11.4 Beta Radeon HD 6870 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst Oct 5, 2010 Beta Radeon HD 6850 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst Oct 5, 2010 Beta Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 10.8 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (ASUS) - Catalyst 10.8 Radeon HD 5830 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 10.8 Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Sapphire FleX) - Catalyst 10.9 Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 10.8 Radeon HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 10.8 NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX 580 1536MB (Reference) - GeForce 262.99 GeForce GTX 570 1280MB (Reference) - GeForce 263.09 GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1024MB (Reference) - GeForce 266.56 GeForce GTX 480 1536MB (Reference) - GeForce 260.63 GeForce GTX 470 1280MB (EVGA) - GeForce 260.63 GeForce GTX 460 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 260.63 GeForce GTX 450 1GB (ASUS) - GeForce 260.63 Audio ASUS Xonar D2X Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis Cooler Master HAF X Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Corsair H50 Self-Contained Liquid Cooler Et cetera Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No virus scanner or firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with Diskeeper 2010 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows 7 from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing inaccurate test results. For example, disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. The most important services we disable are: Diskeeper 2010. Windows Defender. Windows Error Reporting Service. Windows Event Log. Windows Firewall. Windows Search. Windows Update. The full list of Windows services we assure are disabled is large, but for those interested in perusing it, please look here. Most of the services we disable are mild, but we go to such an extent to have the PC as highly optimized as possible. Game Titles. At this time, we benchmark with three resolutions that represent three popular monitor sizes available today, 20" (1680x1050), 24" (1920x1080) and 30" (2560x1600). Each of these resolutions offers enough of a variance in raw pixel output to warrant testing with it, and each properly represent a different market segment: mainstream, mid-range and high-end. Because we value results generated by real-world testing, we don't utilize timedemos. The possible exceptions might be Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage and Unigine's Heaven 2.1. Though neither of these are games, both act as robust timedemos. We choose to use them as they're a standard where GPU reviews are concerned. All of our results are captured with the help of Beepa's FRAPS 3.2.3, while stress-testing and temperature-monitoring is handled by OCCT 3.1.0 and GPU-Z, respectively. For those interested in the exact settings we use for each game, direct screenshots can be seen below: Colin McRae: Dirt 2. Just Cause 2. Mafia II. Metro 2033. StarCraft II. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Colin McRae: Dirt 2] It's not that often that faithful PC gamers get a proper racing game for their platform of choice, but Dirt 2 is one of those. While it is a "console port", there's virtually nothing in the game that will make that point stand out. The game as a whole takes good advantage of our PC's hardware, and it's as challenging as it is good-looking. Manual Run-through: The race we chose to use in Dirt 2 is the first one available in the game, as it's easily accessible and features a lot of GPU-pounding effects that the game has become known for, such as realistic dust and water effects, a large on-looking crowd of people and fine details on and off the track. Each run-through lasts the entire two laps, which comes out to about 2.5 minutes. Given that we're doing our testing with a current Catalyst beta (11.4), which is about four-and-a-half months newer than the driver we used to originally tested the HD 6870 for our launch article, Dirt 2 performance has largely remained in tact. Not that we're complaining... 55 FPS at 2560x1600 with maxed-out details? Who's to complain? [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Just Cause 2] Just Cause 2 might not belong to a well-established series of games, but with its launch, it looks like...

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 FleX Review

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Rob Williams