Sapphire FleX HD 7870 GHZ EDITION Pro Reviews

Let's get the obvious out of the way first; if you can stretch your budget close to £300 and you want to maximise performance, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 670 is our recommended card. It's in the sub-£250 bracket that AMD's Radeon HD 7870 comes into contention, and at this price point there's arguably no better card on the market. If you're gaming at 1080p and you're hoping to keep power-draw and noise down to a comfortable level, the HD 7870 is a good all-round fit. Sapphire has taken that promise and tarted it up appropriately. The HD 7870 Flex GHz Edition offers versatile outputs that make it easy to connect three DVI monitors, an overclocked BIOS is in place to offer that extra burst of performance, and the Dual-X cooler is excellent; it runs quiet and keeps the GPU comfortably cool at all times. There's plenty to like, but AMD's recent price cuts are the big attraction here. Sapphire will put forward a tasty proposition if it brings the HD 7870 Flex GHz Edition to market at around £250, but the card will become truly attractive if/when it nudges closer to the £200 mark.

In our initial launch reviews of the HD 7870, we praised how much performance improved over the last generation, and that still stands. The Sapphire HD 7870 Flex offers performance close to what NVIDIA's last generation GTX 580 flagship provided. Sapphire chose to not overclock their card out of the box, so the Flex runs at the same speed as the AMD reference design. I feel that they missed out on an opportunity here, as the card can easily run higher clocks. In our OC testing we see GPU clocks well above 1200 MHz. Memory reaches 1365 MHz, which is quite a bit lower than other HD 7870 cards, which reach 1600 MHz. This is due to Sapphire's choice to use Elpida memory chips instead of Hynix, which tend to overclock better. A unique feature of Sapphire's Flex Edition is that it can support three DVI/HDMI monitors without the need for an active DisplayPort adapter. AMD has designed their HD 7000 Series cards to provide two TMDS clock signals. DVI, HDMI, passive DP Adapter consume one, while an active DP adapter needs no clock signal from the GPU. As a result, most EyeFinity users without DisplayPort monitors will have to buy an active DP to DVI adapter, which costs between $30 and $60. Sapphire's card doesn't need such an adapter, which will save you that cost.

Overall the card performed pretty well. For me the FleX feature really sells the card; I've been through the pain of buying active adapters and having to wait after just getting new hardware because I can't use with my Eyefinity setup – I mean why have something you can't use? However, performance is just as important if not more important. I liked the Dual BIOS for a quick OC, but I really never understood the point. It's nice to have two if you are like me and like playing with settings as you always have one you can switch back to that you know works for sure; but if I'm guaranteed the 1050MHz OC, why would I run the other BIOS from factory? I don't know; it's a feature that has been around for some time now and I've never really understood it. I was impressed by the ability to overclock the core like crazy. Going from 1000MHz to 1240MHz was a nice surprise; the memory on the other hand was finicky, but isn't it always? It competed nicely with the GTX 580 and surpassed the 6970 without too much of a struggle. It's essentially the replacement to the 6970 and with the GTX 580 being a somewhat "dead" card to the market this is the "new" thing. The price is a bit high and for a little more coin I think I'd go for GTX 670 over this card any day. The GTX 670 trumps all, for the most part, and for the $45 price difference it's more than worth it. This would truly be a heck of a card if the price were quite a bit lower.