Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 Edition Graphics Card Review

Sapphire are renowned for their custom design graphics cards and utilising their many technologies. This ranges from their custom coolers featuring a Vapor-X design, to including a slightly overclocked GPU core and memory speed. You may also find a card that has the FleX ability, which not only allows you to run AMD Eyefinity but instead allows you to run three DVI monitors straight out of the box which for most is a godsend as it allows you to run your setup a lot cheaper than normal.

Luckily this card has all of the above and we will attempt to break it down for you a bit further. Generally to run three monitors would cost a lot of money due to the functionality involved and most cards only having the ability to run the third monitor from a DisplayPort connector. The downside with this, is that an either an expensive active dongle is needed, or an even more expensive DisplayPort monitor. If running more than three monitors, you’ll end up needing DisplayPort 1.2 monitors or a hub and this can all end up being extremely costly. The FleX card allows you to run from the HDMI and convert to DVI with the included adapter and does everything on the card, so no need for expensive active dongles.

The Vapor-X cooler has been a a favourite of ours for quite some time, and the 6970 utilises it extremely well as we saw from our acoustic and temperature tests. It ran quietly and efficiently and that’s exactly what it was set out to do.

We’re big fans of Sapphire as they don’t stick to the reference design and try to do things differently and that’s exactly what we have here. It utilises both these great technologies to give the very best results no matter what your type of usage is. We can also see that the performance really is second to none at all resolutions including Eyefinity. We’ve only been testing Eyefinity resolutions for a small amount of time, but it’s cards like this that really show the true potential behind the technology and what it can really do.

At £322.43, it’s not the cheapest card on the planet, but it is one of the best, and I live by the philosophy of “you get what you pay for” so if you really do want something that’s the best, you better be prepared to shell out the money for it. The fact that it has two BIOS versions, of which one is overclocked is also an extra bonus and that’s why the price seems even more reasonable to me and worth spending the extra cash on.

Now we know that this card is a Battlefield 3 card and in an ideal world we should have seen how it performs in Battlefield 3, but we’re not in an ideal world, so on that note, we didn’t bother. Not because we’re lazy, but more so because the game still has some slight issues and also because it has no benchmark tool, which relies on us more and makes the tests a bit unfair so those are our reasons and that’s what we’re sticking to.

Overall, this card will appeal to any true gamer, especially those wanting some triple screen action as it simply does it, and does it well and looks bloody amazing at the same time. On top of all of that, it’s quiet, uses little power and comes from a reliable brand that you know you can trust and is overclocked too. A simply brilliant card from Sapphire.