SAPPHIRE has long produced premium AMD Radeon GPUs. As such, they are known as one of the upper tier video card vendors for those seeking high-end performance and overclockability.
The fact that Radeon HD GPUs continue to provide stellar performance numbers means that SAPPHIRE is comfortably riding high right now—as long as AMD continues to innovate in the GPU field, SAPPHIRE will be there to carry them along to the masses with premium perks such as custom cooling solutions and lots of bundled extras.
The trend continues with the Radeon HD 6950 DiRT 3 special edition GPU, and today we’ll be looking at this card.
A couple of key features differentiate the DiRT 3 special edition from the normal SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6950. First is the extensive cooler—a dual fan, copper heatpipe monster with a very attractive shroud design, and very different from most Radeon GPUs today. The color scheme is different, as well. Rather than AMD Red, it’s a black, blue, and silver design. Second, the card features an extra gig of GDDR5 ram, for a total of 2gb. Next, we have a physical dual BIOS switch. It also comes with a nice HDMI cable. And then, of course, it comes bundled with DiRT 3 in the form of a Steam code.
The heatsink is what really sets the card apart from its peers. This should allow some nice overclockability out of the box. With SAPPHIRE’s TriXX GPU overclocking utility, this is a pretty easy feat.
The card comes stock at a 800mhz core clock, and a 1250mhz DDR clock. The stock temp is around 38° at idle.
I’ll use the Unigine Heaven 2.5 benchmark to load the card and test the overclock. It uses all of the cards DirectX 11 features, including heavy tessellation. I’ll also run the punishing Metro 2033 and of course, DiRT 3 through it and see how it performs when overclocked.
Specs:
OUTPUT:
1xDual-Link DVI
1xDisplayPort
1xSingle-Link DVI-D
1xHDMI 1.4a
DisplayPort 1.2GPU:
800MHzCore Clock
1408xStream Processors
40nmChip
DirectX 11MEMORY:
5000MHz Effective
2048MB 256-bit GDDR5BUNDLE:
Driver CD
SAPPHIRE TriXX Overclocking Utility
1xDirt®3 Coupon
CrossFire™ Bridge Interconnect Cable
DVI to VGA Adapter
6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable x 2
HDMI 1.4a high speed 1.8 meter cable(Full retail SKU only)
Benchmarks:
I’m not using a strict benchmark system; rather I opted to test under “real world” conditions: a normal desktop PC, with background tasks running and not super-tweaked specifically for benchmarking. I feel this is a more accurate approach because it’s going to give performance numbers very similar to what an average consumer would experience if purchasing this card for their own PC.
I used four overclocking profiles: Stock (800 core / 1250 DDR), Mild (830 core / 1300 DDR), Moderate (880 core / 1400 DDR), and Aggressive (900 core / 1400 DDR). When I tried pushing the card beyond 900mhz, I started to experience some glitching and I didn’t really want to turn this into a dedicated overclocking article; I’m sure it could be tweaked more—we’re seeing clocks on air in the 930mhz range on other sites. At 900 core / 1400 DDR, this card was rock solid.
The benchmark system itself is modest—an AMD Phenom II X4 965 on an ECS A890GXM-A with 4gb of DDR3 and a WD Raptor 10K SATA drive, running Windows 7 64-bit with Service Pack 1.
UNIGINE HEAVEN 2.5
Unigine Heaven is a thorough DirectX 11-focused benchmark. It makes heavy use of tessellation as well as lots of ambient occlusion and dynamic lighting. At stock, the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6950 slices through the benchmark at acceptable levels, and with a good overclock, we’re approaching 40FPS.
METRO 2033
Metro 2033 is a brutal game on video cards, and can really push even high-end GPUs. For some reason, a mild overclock did nothing at all to the framerate, but once we kicked the OC into high gear, we broke the 40FPS mark.
DiRT 3
This is the game the card is named for, so you know it’s going to perform well. On high settings, it plows through the game at 54FPS right out of the box. Overclock it, and now we’re talking. The game looks amazing at 1920×1200, and makes great use of DirectX 11 technologies to achieve graphics so realistic, it sometimes looks like you’re watching a rally race on TV.
Features
As you can see, this card responds well to overclocking, and if you’re in the market for this generation of card, you’re under-utilizing it if you don’t at least try your hand at overclocking it a little bit. The big copper heatpipe sink and dual fans ensure that you’ll be okay on air cooling. It also sports a dual BIOS if you want to really start taking your OC efforts into high gear. The dual BIOS is accessible with a hardware switch, which makes this one of the most desirable 6950s around.
The SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6950 will support three monitors with Eyefinity. In addition, the card contains PowerPlay technology, which allows the card to clock down significantly in idle/desktop states. The card will quiet down to nearly silent when you’re not gaming and it sips power daintily if it doesn’t need it. That’s neat, but what’s really cool is PowerTune. We go a bit more in-depth into what PowerTune is in our recent look at the AMD FirePro V5900 and V7900, but suffice to say it’s something that allows AMD engineers to cram higher speeds and more features into a GPU while maintaining a good TDP envelope. It’s not sexy technology, but it is pretty darn amazing.
The 6950 supports UVD3 (Unified Video Decoder 3) which allows hardware acceleration of your video content, including Blu-ray and Flash. If you use a current browser (IE 9, Chrome 12, Firefox 4), the 6950 will also offload some of the rendering (even 2D) to the GPU. As we get more and more software that supports OpenCL, the Radeon HD 6950 will continue to accelerate more tasks. The hardware is ready for the software to be developed, basically.
Conclusion
The nice thing about this special edition card is that it’s not just another reference 6950 bundled with a game. This is a unique card with features that set it apart from its brethren: The cooler is excellent, it comes with a dual BIOS switch, it’s very responsive to overclocking, and it comes with an HDMI cable. That makes it an excellent value compared to other 6950s out there. If you’re in the market for a 6950, this is what I would consider the most premium version of the 6950 out there.
The SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6950 DiRT 3 edition is available for around $270 from Newegg. We’re proud to award the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6950 DiRT 3 special edition GPU the Icrontic Stamp of Approval for excellent value.
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