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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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As with all of the other HD 6950’s you have two pair of six pin connections, two short of your typical HD 6970.

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Wingless92's Avatar
Wingless92 replied the topic: #16421 02 Jul 2011 02:40
Seems like a good card, to me atleast.

Nice to see the graphs now with the arrows pointing to which GPU it is.

We need more Nvidia card reviews!

Regardless, Dirt3 is a great game.

Can you flash this to a 6970?
garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #16423 02 Jul 2011 14:45
Wait until you see the graphs for our next video card review! I spent a little time trying to reflash this card last night and didn't have luck, but I don't think it was the cards fault.

I would like to cover more Nvidia based cards also, we don't always have control over what cards we get in.

I am also working on retesting a lot of our past video cards to fill in all of our newer tests. That includes more Crossfire and SLI results.

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