Sapphire presents another Dirt 3 Edition graphics card
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
Sapphire specializes in AMD products, although we’ve seen them venture into Intel territory earlier this year, they’re still working hard with AMD, and more recently, on a third product in the Dirt 3 Edition with another HD 6870.
On the outside, or at least under the heatsink, it stays an HD6870, with 1120 stream processors and 56 texture processing units, but at heart it’s an overclocked enthusiast’s best friend, with a core clock speed jumped to 920MHz and the 1GB GDDR5 memory is boosted to 1050MHz, allowing better performances than its stock counterpart.
The shell is also changed, from the Flex edition, which was also a Dirt 3 Edition, this HD6870 features two 90mm fans with specially designed impellers that still move the same amount of air, but for a noise output reduced by 10% compared to conventional fans and are also equipped with Sapphire’s special dust repelling bearing for more reliability.
Featuring a variety of output options including two DVI, one HDMI updated to 1.4a, two mini DisplayPort and the support for VGA with the supplied dongle, the HD6870 Dirt 3 Edition also supports Eyefinity up to four monitors.
Incorporated in the HD6870 is the third generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD for short) supporting Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) for a smooth Blu-ray 3D decoding with reduced CPU loads including other file formats as well. The updated HDMI 1.4a bring deeper colour, enhanced high resolution output for Digital Theatre applications, support for 3D stereoscopic as well as 7.1 high bit-rate audio. In addition, the HD6870 also supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.
This version of the HD6870 can also be used to accelerate other applications including video transcoding, web browsers, as well as Microsoft Office 2010.
Featuring AMD’s second generation of graphics technology, the HD6870 also supports DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11, all of which built into AMD’s 40nm process which delivers higher performance for lower power consumption.
All of the latest features are enhanced thanks to the advanced hardware, which includes enhanced Tessellation unit, dedicated HDR Texture compression, multi-threaded communication with the system CPU cores, as well as most of the ones already stated above.
Supported by AMD’s DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver, all of these features can be yours on pre-order for a price of €208.
For more information, please visit Sapphire’s product page.
