For our write-up today I just want to follow up with our past reviews on the Sapphire HD 7970 and the XFX R7970 DD Black Edition Overclocked. Today we are going to show off the results of our crossfire benchmarks. This isn’t a review, just our results. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. For those of you in the Midwest like me try to stay warm and safe with all of the snow coming in!
Now that we have had a chance to take a look at a reference design HD 7970 and see how dominating one can be I am excited to take a look at XFX’s new Black Edition Overclocked R7970. Unlike most of the other manufactures their version is both overclocked and equipped with their Double Dissipation cooling solution, a heatsink that has to be one of the sexiest coolers on the market. We know how the stock card performs, but how will it perform with a 1000Mhz clock speed and a badass cooler? Let’s find out!
All of the holidays, New Years, and CES cause a chaos this time a year. Last year we had the Sandy Bridge launch in the mix. This year AMD's new GPU series launch is packed in as well. Around the holidays we saw a few reviews using AMD's reference design. Sampling was very limited; today all of the manufactures can finally release all of their reviews. Today we are covering Sapphires first card of many, the HD 7970. This card uses the reference design and cooler and should be a great way to judge the series’ performance without any overclocking or aftermarket cooling. AMD advertises the HD 7970 as the world’s fastest single GPU, let’s find out!
When looking at video cards it’s not always just the price and performance that are things to consider. Depending on your situation, noise, power usage, height and width of the card all have to be taken into consideration. A good example of this would be a low profile HTPC case, you of course will want the best performance but if it requires extra power connectors it may not work. In some cases you don’t have room for a dual PCI slot card or you need a low profile card. Those are all examples of where Sapphires newest card the HD 6670 Low Profile would come in handy. As a single width, low profile capable card it can fit in almost any situation, even better it doesn’t require any extra power connections. The question is how will it perform, lets find out.
Nvidia’s GTX580 launched close to a year ago yet is still one of the top performing video cards on the market. When you are a manufacture like EVGA, where do you go after you have introduced a full product line around the GTX580? Apparently if left alone, EVGA’s engineers in collaboration with overclockers “k|ngp|n” and “TiN”) will turn the GTX580 a monster just begging to be overclocked. With a revamped VRM circuitry with solid-state chokes, dual BIOS’s, and power coming from two 8 pin’s AND a 6pin this could very well be the fastest GTX580 on the market when overclocked. Of course the only way to find out is to read farther into our review.
With a black and orange design on their non-reference video cards, it’s no surprise that we jumped on the chance to take a look at one of Zotac's AMP! Cards. The card they sent was their Nvidia GTX 550 Ti AMP!, an overclocked version of the card we took a look at this past March. With the core clock set at a steamy 1000 MHz I’m excited to see how well their aftermarket heatsink will perform. While we are at it we are going to bring out our reference card and run through our SLI testing also. Not only do you get overclocked numbers, but we can see how well this budget card performs when you double up.
At the end of May AMD announced that select video cards would include Dirt 3 Steam codes. To celebrate Sapphire recently introduced their HD6950 Dirt 3 Edition. We know it’s going to include a copy of the game Dirt 3, but what else do we have in store? If it’s anything like what we have seen in the past from Sapphire we can expect a good performing card with a cooler design unique to Sapphire. Let’s find out!
We recently explored Sapphire's FleX edition of the new HD 6770, a black sheep in the new Northern Islands family still running on a Juniper-based core. Though it has a great value, the true entry-level cards for the 6xxx series are the 6450, 6570, and the 6670. Today we'll be sitting down with the latter of the three, to see if Sapphire adds a little extra value to the package.
The graphics card industry has undergone more than a few changes in the first half of 2011, including a branding shift within AMD itself. At the end of April, the manufacturer announced plans to introduce an updated version of their popular HD 5770 and HD5750. That upgrade has us today taking a look at the HD6770. In this case we will be taking a look at Sapphires FleX version of the card. Some of you may remember that we took a look at the HD5770 FleX last August, along with just about every other FleX model in between. The HD5770 FleX was given our Editors Choice; will its replacement do the same? In order to do that the HD6770 will still have to maintain a great price to performance ratio, something that may be hard to do with all of the great competition.
When a new series of video cards is launched it’s easy to get distracted by the new flashy cards and their amazing performance. The problem is when it comes to mid-range and lower cards sometimes last generations cards perform as well or better at similar price points. This can mean a simple decision on a video card for a budget build could have tens or hundreds of options to choose from. To give you another option Sapphire has brought back their HD5800 series cards with new Xtreme Edition series. They introduced today both the HD5830 and HD5850, of which we will be taking a look at the HD5850. Let’s take a look at what is different with this reintroduction and how it affects the budget gamer.
The proverbial ink has hardly dried on our review of Sapphires HD6870 Flex and we are already introducing another member of the Flex family. That’s because Sapphire is hoping to give everyone the option to go Flex no matter the budget or performance requirements. This also happens to be the first HD6950 to come through our office, finally giving us a chance to check out the performance of AMD’s third in command. Talk about killing two birds with one stone, let’s take a look at the Sapphire FleX HD 6950 2Gb.
It seems like it was only a few weeks ago I was talking about Nvidia’s latest card the GTX560 Ti. Now here we are launching our review of the GTX550 Ti, the little brother to the GTX560 Ti. The GTX550 Ti fills the gap between the GTS 450 and the GTX 460, with its eye directly on AMD’s popular HD5770. With aggressive performance and pricing, Nvidia hopes to capture the budget market playing the same game AMD plays. How will it hold up against the aging HD5770, let’s take a look.
When you are looking for video cards there are so many things to consider it can be very over whelming. Even after you have picked the model you are going to go with, what brand do you pick? Overclocked? Something has to stand out from the crowd or you’re more likely just going to pick the cheapest card available and go on with life. Sapphire has a product line that hopes to do just that. The Flex edition cards are designed to be more functional than a standard card and depending on the situation they can be a MUCH better deal. Today I am going to take a look at their HD6870 Flex edition and explain why you should consider a Flex card next time you are on the market.
With the introduction of the GTX 460 last July, Nvidia changed the game entirely. The 460 showed amazing performance and overclockability while being priced for someone looking for a budget build. The GTX 460, seven months later, is still exactly that. With the introduction of the GTX 500 series cards recently, Nvidia is now introducing the GTX 560 Ti. While not a replacement for the GTX 460, the GTX 560 Ti occupies the position just above it. Nvidia told us that with the GTX 560 Ti the “sweet spot” just got sweeter, let’s dive in and find out.
It was only a few months ago when everyone found out that AMD’s HD6800 series would not be their flagship, rather a performance/price sweet spot. Today we finally have the chance to take a closer look at the new HD6970, AMD’s most powerful single GPU graphics card. Sapphire sent out one of their Radeon HD6970 Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam – Gaming Edition, a mouthful to say the least. But will the performance live up to the oddly long name? Let’s find out.
Only a few weeks ago AMD introduced their 6800 series cards featuring both the 6850 and 6870. We covered the 6870 with both Single and Dual card reviews. It didn’t take long to see non-reference designs coming from Sapphire with their Toxic HD6850 being announced today. We have had the pleasure of putting the card through its paces to see how it compares to the 6870 in both price and performance. With the GPU being clocked at 820MHz over the stock 775MHz and a memory frequency bump of 400MHz, from 4000Mhz to 4400MHz it should perform well. But with a few less shaders, compaired to the HD6870, will it hold its own? How will it compaire to Nvidia's offerings?
Shortly after working on our original review of the HD 6870, I was surprised by the FedEx guy showing up late Wednesday evening with a HD 6870 from Sapphire in hand. Who needs sleep right? I didn’t waste any time firing our test bench back up to put the card to the test. The best part? Because I happened to have two cards sitting here I went ahead and threw them together in Crossfire for a little multi-card action. Of course you have to click the link below to find out how both performed.
Earlier this week the rumors of an upcoming AMD video card line was finally confirmed with their HD 6800 series. They will be starting things off with both the HD6870 and HD6850. This time around the x800 cards are AMD’s “sweet spot” cards, with a flagship card to follow. Today we will be taking a look at the HD6870, specifically Diamond Multimedia’s Overclocked version. How will the HD6870 hold up? I can’t contain myself anymore, let’s jump in!
Having taken a look at the GTX 460 only a few weeks ago, I was left impressed with its performance as it overpowered the HD 5770’s that we have always recommended. My only complaint was that NVidia’s lowest Direct X11 card would not run in my Shuttles because of the dual 6 pin connectors. With their newest addition we finally have a NVidia solution that not only has just one 6 pin, but comes in at just under 130 bucks.· Today we will be taking a peak at Gigabytes version of the GTS450 along with the reference card from NVidia to see both the difference between the two and the GTS 450’s SLI performance.
As much fun as it might be to play on three monitors using Eyefinity, the biggest hurdle to cost is the cost of three monitors, an Eyefinity enabled video card, and an active display port to DVI adapter. Two weeks ago I took a look at the HD5770 Flex from Sapphire that didn’t require an active adapter. Today AMD announced their newest active adapters, at 30% of the cost it should help keep the cost down.
