Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 Edition Graphics Card Review

With lots of rumours about AMD and Nvidia releasing new cards in 2012, we find a lot of graphics card manufacturers clinching on to the life of the current cards and trying to spice things up to give a breath of fresh air to an already old card. The 6970 isn't exactly old, as it's still very current, but with a fast paced industry like this one, technology is old before its even been released. This is down to the manufacturer's starting the thought process on its sucessor already, even at the early stages, and that's a good thing, as it keeps the tech fast moving and invites new things to be brought to the table. To give a certain range of cards a slight edge, we see vendors giving it an overhaul in terms of cooling, or giving a slight bump to the clock speeds or even adding their own technology to the PCB, or sometimes even doing a combination which is what we've seen with the FleX series of cards from Sapphire. FleX offers a custom Vapor-X cooler design, as well as incorporating their technology which offers a FleXible solution to multiple monitor configurations, especially with Eyefinity being the new hot way to game at the moment. Today we're looking at a 6970 FleX card with a difference, as it includes the fancy Vapor-X cooler, the FleX technology, but is overclocked too and even comes with Battlefield 3 to get you gaming in no time. You can't really ask for much more, especially on a high-end card, much like this one. We're really interested to see how this limited edition card performs in our tests, as from the offset, it seems to offer the whole package. The front of the box is certainly full of information, and a lot has to be said about this limited edition card, as it includes a lot of features and is capable of a lot due to the FleX abilities and the fact that it's overclocked and hopefully has sufficient cooling too. Turning things around, we find the usual patter from Sapphire and a list of features that the card has, most of which are due to AMD and not so much because of Sapphire, though we saw the main Sapphire features on the front of the card, so we're not really missing out on anything here. Opening the box up, we're pretty aware of the usual things from Sapphire including a VGA to DVI adapter, Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable, HDMI cable, HDMI to DVI dongle, CrossFire bridge, Twin Molex to 8-pin PCI-Express adapter, single Molex to 6-pin PCI-Express adapter, quick installation guide, driver installation CD with casebadge sticker and a Sapphire product registration leaflet to the Sapphire Select Club. The only thing missing in our product sample was the Battlefield 3 coupon but we can assure you that a retail version will come supplied with the coupon, as long as it's bought from a reputable retail channel. 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. The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results. Test System: Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z Intel Core i7 2700k 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 FleX Battlefield 3 Edition Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050W Kingston V+ 100 128GB SSD Lian Li T60 3 x AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Aliens Vs Predator Dirt 3 F1 2011 Just Cause 2 Mafia II Metro 2033 Hardware used: Plug-in electricity usage monitor Sound level meter Software used: 3DMark 11 HWMonitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. The 6970 shows what it's all about in 3DMark 11 by displaying some really good results, especially on the Performance preset. Heaven 2.1 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. Heaven showed some also promising results and with the combined functionality of Eyefinity, you can tweak the settings and get some higher frame-rate figures when using 5760x1080. Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game. Aliens Vs Predator saw some really great results, even when using very high settings. Showing the true potential behind Eyefinity, we see a steady 30.4 FPS on average at the super-sizes 5760x1080 resolution. Dirt 3 was released in May 2011 and is the third in the Dirt series offering a complete overhaul in terms of graphics for the DirectX 11 platform which extreme lighting effects and reflections as well as showcasing fast moving graphics and using in game physics to bring the most extreme quality in terms of video rendering. Within Dirt 3, the 6970 really excelled on both resolutions and with a slight tweak of the graphical options, a higher frame-rate can be achieved on Eyefinity. F1 2011 is the latest instalment from Codemasters and is based upon the 2011 Formula One season. It utilises the latest DirectX 11 features including shadows, particles and reflections to offer the very best graphics in a fast-paced moving game with depth of field being a key focus. It relies heavily on all aspects of a computer system including GPU and CPU. The same story with F1 2011, though over the 30FPS milestone in Eyefinity, the settings were put to ultra and the 6970 could still perform amazingly. Just Cause 2 is an open world action-adventure video game that was released at the beginning of 2010. The game uses the Avalanche Engine 2.0 and runs on DirectX 10. Several graphics effects and features are used to give a thorough workout to new and even older graphics cards. Within Just Cause 2, the results at both 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 both excelled past the 60FPS milestone showing that the other cards we used for comparison, couldn't keep up in the slightest. Mafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games. Mafia II also showed some great potential behind the 6970 in all resolutions. Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. Metro being an intensive benchmark still saw some fantastic results on the 6970, especially at 1680x1050 which is still a common resolution for a lot of gamers. Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it's necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain. Due to the vapor chamber design cooler, the acoustic values are really low, especially at load showing that the fan noise doesn't increase too much when put under stress. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. The 6970 only used a very low 109.5 Watts on idle which is really low for a card of this calibre. At load, the overall system still only used 239.7 Watts which for a flagship AMD single core card is still remarkably low. Measuring temperatures is all about being consitent, therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again. An astonishingly low 28 degrees at idle was a fantastic result, as well as 68 at full maximum load. 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.