Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB Dirt 3 Edition Graphics Card Review

A Closer LookThe card being a 6950 gave us the impression it would be a reference design bundled with a coupon, but from a first glance, we can see the cooler and PCB have been completely redesigned. The card is taken over by a huge plastic heatsink cover, featuring two large fans with Sapphire branding. A big step up from the reference cooler design.

Coming out of the bottom are fiver copper heatpipes which connect directly to the copper baseplate that makes contact with the GPU. These heatpipes then transfer heat to five specific points on the cards aluminium heatsink for the best heat dissipation.

As the card still uses reference clock speeds, it’s no surprise that it only requires the two standard 6-pin PCI-Express connectors to pump enough juice to it.

Moving along the top of the card we find the single CrossFire connector, though a 6950 would generally include two CrossFire connectors. As this card uses a custom PCB, Sapphire must have made a worthwhile decision when it came to that area.

A slightly hidden feature of this card is a BIOS switch, which can only be seen if you look for it and is hardly noticeable. In fact it is so well hidden that you need to use some kind of instrument like a small screwdriver to switch between the two BIOS versions. This allows the user to switch between the two BIOS editions that this card has, which is especially handy if overclocking.

Another aspect of the card that is unique in terms of this particular version is the connectivity side of things. We would generally be faced with five various connector ports, whereas this card only includes four. We find that two DVI ports are present, as well as a HDMI port and a DisplayPort which is still enough to get some decent Eyefinity going.

The specifications on the card are the reference clock speeds in terms of both GPU clock and memory clock, yet we feel Sapphire could have given a bit extra on this card in terms of pre-overclocked speeds to give this card the slight edge against the competition.