Card Layout and Photos
The cooler on the HD 7870 has two large fans with the flex logos on each. This is actually the only place where you can find flex labeling on the card. This is because this is the same cooler Sapphire went with on their other HD 7870’s as well, called the Dual-X cooler. Why change it up if it works right? The plastic shroud has a nice look to it, standing out from reference designs. Up top there is a nice Sapphire HD 7870 sticker letting people know what card you are sporting when it’s in your case. You will also notice up top that this card has just one crossfire connection meaning you can’t run three or four in crossfire.
The view from the bottom shows off the cards massive heatpipes. Sapphire pulls the heat from over the GPU to the outside of the heatsink for the most efficient cooling.
For power, the HD 7870 is sporting two six pin connections. If you don’t have enough on your power supply Sapphire did provide the two adapters to use. I love that each adapter only requires one molex connection as well, most take two.
The Flex edition stands out a little bit from other sapphire cards with its connections. You have two DVI ports (one Dual-link and one Single-link), you also have a full sized DisplayPort, and a full sized HDMI port. Because this is a FLeX card you can use all four of these ports in Eyefinity, giving you three non-display port connections.
The HD 7870 FLeX Edition has a blue PCB like other Sapphire cards. From around back you have a good view of an interesting support along the top of the card as well. This helps with mounting its heatsink and also gives the hard support to prevent sagging over time.
The end of the card is open meaning it will blow some of the cards heat back into the case. This is fine in some cases but if heat is already an issue putting more heat into your case may be an issue.
