Sapphire FleX HD 7950 Pro Reviews

Sapphire's HD 7950 Flex is a solid implementation of a custom design, overclocked HD 7950. It comes with a unique feature, which is support for three HDMI/DVI monitors without the need for an active DisplayPort to DVI adapter. AMD has engineered their Tahiti GPU in a way that limits it to generating two TMDS clock signals for HDMI/DVI monitors. Sapphire added a small extra display controller chip which provides a third clock signal, adding support for the third monitor. In terms of raw performance we see about 6% improvement compared to the AMD reference board, which is a nice speed boost. Unfortunately memory is not overclocked, which would be easy to do, as the card reached an amazing 1865 MHz memory clock after we manually increased memory speeds. Overclocking in general works well, even though the maximum GPU clock is about 50 MHz lower than on some other HD 7950 cards we tested before. Overall manual overclocking yields an impressive 22% real life performance improvement, which puts the card between GTX 670 and GTX 680 in performance.

After the rigorous rounds of testing, it is clear to see that although AMD cards may be beaten at lower resolutions, their capabilities quickly catch up and sometimes surpass nVidia's with large performance gains in high resolutions. As the purpose of this FleX edition card implies, it's most likely going to be used to drive more than one monitor. With that being said, it should be a clear decision-maker when selecting a video card. Powering up to five monitors alone may be the biggest selling point of these FleX edition cards, or perhaps the Dual DVI support + HDMI making cheap triple monitor setups easy without the need for expensive Displayport adapters. Although not as good as other HD 7950s we have played with, the card overclocks well. Additionally, the load temperatures are excellent. The idle temperatures are a bit deceiving when it came to first impressions, but I certainly got a surprise when I saw the nice temperatures even when overclocked to its limit. Although I won't need it (at least in the future), the dual BIOS switch can be a lifesaver for some. Having a failsafe backup in case of an emergency from a bad BIOS flash is a wonderful asset to someone who desires peace of mind. For a card that goes for right at $400, it may be a big price to pay but for those who would be buying the card would be buying it for its multimonitor capabilities and the performance associated in them. I like what Sapphire is doing with the FleX edition cards and I hope we get to see more of them.

At $419.99 the Sapphire HD 7950 Flex Edition is the most expensive Sapphire HD 7950 over at Newegg at the moment. If you're after a video card that is capable of driving three DVI monitors, this is a really good buy. On the other hand if you're after a HD 7950 with the same cooler, but don't need a card that can drive three DVI monitors in Eyefinity, the 950MHz clocked OC version that comes in at $389.99 after rebate is going to be the better option.