Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 Edition Graphics Card Review

The card from a first glance looks very similar to any recent FleX card on the market, including the 6950 Flex. The cooler is mostly made from plastic and covers the whole card from end to end. The plastic casing is black and includes a Sapphire branded fan situated in the middle, where they believe the most efficient cooling is. It’s quite sad that the card looks standard FleX and includes no mention of BF3 anywhere on the card itself.

The fan is 92mm by the looks of things and has a unique design due to the slight lip at the end of each fin which assists in exhausting the hot air away from the card. Under the fan is where we find the Vapor-X style design vapor chamber cooling solution. This is a tried and tested method from Sapphire and gives quiet and efficient cooling when needed the most. This design was implemented many generations ago and has continued to be a success on the latest cards, including this; the 6970 Radeon.

As we already gave it away with the power cable accessories, we made you aware that this card has both a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express power connect along the top end of the card as we’d expect on a Radeon 6970.

Moving further along towards the back we find two CrossFire connectors for those wanting to see some multiple GPU action. There is also the standard BIOS switch button if you look closely for switching between the two BIOS revisions that the card has, and allows for some further overclocking and tweaking, of which Sapphire obviously recommend their TriXX overclocking software, and from first hand information, we can agree that it is good and worth a tinkle.

The rear I/O is where things get interesting as we find the FleX range of cards always are. We find two Mini DisplayPort connectors, a HDMI and two DVI’s of which one is single-link and the other is dual-link. With the use of the HDMI to DVI dongle, it’s one of the only cards on the market that can run triple screen Eyefinity through three DVI connections though most monitors with DVI connections, also generally have HDMI capabilities too.

As mentioned earlier, this card has a slightly overclocked speed  rating and thus we find the stock 880MHz has been ramped up to 930MHz but only on the second BIOS. Whilst the core clock has been increased, the memory speed remains at the default speed of 5500MHz effective.