Sapphire FLEX HD 6970 Pro Reviews

The fastest card in Sapphire’s FleX line-up carries on the good work, done by the previous generation. If you want to setup Eyefinity without the tears, it’s the only ball game in town.

Sapphire's very best single-GPU card is the Radeon HD 6970 FleX. It packs in a trio of company-specific technologies - customised rear exhaust plate, three DVI monitor support and a second, overclocked BIOS - and throws in the recently-released Battlefield 3 for good measure. Able to smoothly run the new Battlefield game at a full-HD resolution with all the bells and whistles tacked on, Sapphire opens the path for user-based overclocking, on top of the 930MHz shipping core, by including an 8-pin PCIe connector and voltage adjustment. This, then, is about as good as Radeon HD 6970 2GB gets.Though a little too loud (out of the box) for our liking when under the hammer, Sapphire's Radeon HD 6970 2GB FleX remains a good, solid choice for the enthusiast who wants a well-rounded card that, in theory, is about as futureproof as they come.

Even though there are only minute differences in performance between the recently released cards from Sapphire versus earlier cards of the same model, there are advantages to grabbing one of the newer, though redundant cards. Yes, the clock-for-clock performance of this HD 6970 is going to be pretty much identical to that of the nearly one-year old models, but there are some perks to buying new. First, even though there has hardly been any milestone introductions to the video card market since the HD 69x0 series, you can now find them for $50-$100 cheaper than they were previously. Second, many new cards are no longer using the original, reference-style cooler. Almost all of Sapphire's cards (and other manufacturers) have moved away from a blower and a block of copper toward heatpipes, vapor chambers, and quieter propeller-style fans. We can clearly see the major decrease in idle and load temperatures in both stock and overclocked scenarios with these new coolers — and at the same or lower noise level. Not only do you get an improved cooler, but you'll also get more stability and reliability out of the new cards with the now common dual-BIOS switch, newer firmwares, and additional monitor support with the FleX edition cards from Sapphire.