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!
Product Name: Sapphire HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition
Review Sample Provided by: Sapphire
Review by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
Specifications
|
Output |
1xDual-Link DVI |
|
GPU |
800MHzCore Clock |
|
Memory |
5000MHzEffective |
|
Software |
Driver CD |
|
Accessory |
CrossFire™ Bridge Interconnect Cable |
Packaging
With a Monster-sponsored Ford Fiesta on the front of the packaging, its clear right away that this is the Dirt 3 Edition of the HD 6950. If that wasn’t enough to clue you in, the Dirt 3 logo above the car should do the trick. This card uses Sapphire's standard packing design with the lack of AMD’s Ruby being one of the main exceptions. Also in large letters on the front is the model name helping you tell this card from a similarly designed box of any other Sapphire card. Along the bottom you have all the nitty gritty details like DirectX11, Eyefinity, and any other important feature for the HD 6950. Two things that stand out on the cover outside of the specifications and features are two stickers for free items included with the card: Dirt 3 and an HDMI cable. According to the box, by picking up this card you should have everything you need to get hooked up and even play your first game. Around back you have more detailed write-ups for each of the features mentioned on the front along with a gathering of awards that Sapphire cards have won in the past.
Inside the card is wrapped up in a static free bag that has a padding built into it and is laying in a recycled paper shell that allows them to tuck away all of the accessories underneath. For accessories you have the HDMI cable I mentioned before, a DVI to VGA adapter, a crossfire bridge, and two 6-pin power adapters.
For documentation and software you have a Sapphire select card, a quick installation guide, your driver disc and a card with a Steam key for Dirt 3. It always takes me back 5 or 10 years when we see a free copy of a game with a video card. This practice used to be expected but with all of the competition in the market it has become more and more uncommon. This is even more impressive because of the calibur of game that Dirt 3 is. This isn’t a bargain bin game, it was only recently released. If you haven’t played Dirt 3, you really are missing out. Of course if you are considering picking up this card, you may soon have a chance to do it. For free to boot!
Board Layout
The first think you will notice with the Dirt3 Edition of the HD 6950 is the lack of anything on the card saying Dirt 3. When I received this card I expected to see something similar to the Battlefield Vietnam Edition of the HD 6970 that reviewed previously, but this is the exact opposite. Sapphire went with a non-reference heatsink design this time around with two massive fans on the side. From a side view the five thick heatsinks are just another clue that this cooler can perform.
The plastic shroud is molded to have a very distinctive shape. You have something similar to a Z-shape in between the two fans with a glossy black finish. In that Z they have the Radeon HD 6950 printed on, it’s interesting that there isn’t any mention of the Dirt 3 edition along with the HD 6950. The rest of the shroud has a textured finish with grove cut into it to give it a little extra style. If you look closely you can even see two screw heads molded in to give it that extra touch.
Sapphire has used this fan design before on a few of their Flex cards and I always am impressed with the performance and style of them. This time around with two fans on one card it’s no different.
The rear PCI slot packs in two DVI ports, a full sized display port, and an HDMI. On top of all of that they had to fit in a little cooling, this time with a half slot of vents.
Up top you have one Crossfire connection; a little odd with most HD6950’s sporting two. This means you’re limited to two cards if you decided to up your performance. Although it is interesting, I doubt this will affect 99% of the market. I doubt that triple crossfire is THAT big of a market for a card that isn’t the flagship card (6970/6990).
Considering all you will see of your card when its installed is the top edge, it was nice of Sapphire to include a nice sapphire logo that will be easy to read through your side window. I would love to see them place the model name in this location also, with cards looking so similar between models it could make life a little easier.
Although you won’t see it much, the blue PCB color seems an interesting choice with Sapphires use of black in all of their recent motherboard introductions. Also, even though you can’t see it in this photo. Just to the left of the crossfire connection you have a BIOS backup switch. For those of you looking for a good card to reflash this has the potential to be one.
As it turns out, the entire card including the cooler is just a few millimeters shorter than the reference HD 6970, but as you can see from behind, the PCB itself falls a little short. The cooler looks to be design to fit the standard size PCB and hangs over this PCB by a full inch. This does give you a chance to see the heatsink design along with one of those massive heatpipes running all along the bottom of the card.
As with all of the other HD 6950’s you have two pair of six pin connections, two short of your typical HD 6970.
Our Test Rig
Intel i7 930 CPU Running at 2.8 (Stock)
Gigabyte X58A-UD5 Motherboard
Patriot Sector 7 Ram Triple Channel
Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive
Cogage True Spirit
Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU
http://www.highspeedpc.com/ Test Bench
Our Testing Procedures
All of our in game performance testing was run at 1920x1080, you can see the exact settings below. Here are the details for each of our tests.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 (1920x1080 – high settings, first scene starting after the cut scene, recorded using fraps)
Call Of Duty Black Ops (1920x1080 – high settings, first scene starting after the cut scene, recorded using fraps)
Dirt 2 (1920x1080 – 4x MSAA – high settings, in-game benchmark)
Dirt 3 (192x1080 - 4xMSAA - high settings, in-game benchmark)
Mafia 2 (built-in benchmark, 1920x1080, PhysX on, high settings)
Metro 2033 DX11 (built-in benchmark, 1920 x 1080; DirectX: DirectX 11; Quality: Very High; Antialiasing: MSAA 4X; Texture filtering: AF 4X; Advanced PhysX: Enabled; Tessellation: Enabled; DOF: Disabled)
Metro 2033 DX10 (built-in benchmark, 1920 x 1080; DirectX: DirectX 10; Quality: Very High; Antialiasing: MSAA 4X; Texture filtering: AF 4X; Advanced PhysX: Enabled; Tessellation: Enabled; DOF: Disabled)
Total War: Shogun 2 Direct X11 Benchmark High setting
Synthetic Benchmarks For video cards our synthetic benchmarks are limited to 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage 2011. 3DMark Vantage is run with PPU turned off with results from both the performance and high settings. In 3DMark Vantage 2011 we run both performance and extreme benchmarks.
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 2011
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Call of Duty Black Ops
Dirt 2
Dirt 3
Mafia 2
Metro 2033
Total War: Shogun 2
Performance
In both our synthetic and in-game benchmarks the HD 6950 showed an incredible ability to be able to play any game in a good resolution and with the settings cranked up. The only exception to that rule is, as always our Metro 2033 benchmark. But even there the only card that out performed it was the HD6970.
Outside of graphical performance it’s also important to take into account the cooling systems performance along with the noise output. Some people would rather not have to put in ear plugs to drown out the hum from a noisy video card. With the HD 6950 I was expecting nothing but the best, the five heatpipes and two fans look like they will perform well. As I suspected the cooling performance of the new heatsink design was top notch. Running through our benchmarks we put the video card under some of the toughest real world conditions available. Keeping things cool was easy with a heatsink that can maybe be described best by calling it overkill. Because of this the noise output of the HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition was amazing. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke we jumped into AMD’s control panel and turned the fan up to 100% utilization, and even at 100% the card was barely audible.
Overall
With top shelf performance, a free game, free HDMI cable, and a stylish cooler Sapphire’s HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition a gem of a card. At first it was a little disappointing that it lacked artwork from Dirt 3, but the cooler they included has to be the best designs we have seen come out of Sapphire to date. Short of one of Sapphire's silent cards I doubt you will find many cards that are as quiet as this card, even at 100% fan speed. Even better is the inclusion of a bios switch that should make it safe to reflash your vBIOS to unlock some HD 6970 performance. On top of that you have full access to Sapphires TriXX software to tweak even more performance out of this card. It’s clear that Sapphire is trying to position this to be the go to card for tweaking. Because of that, and the included freebee’s this is an amazing value, one of the best on the market currently.
