Sapphire Radeon HD 6950

Examination:

With the Radeon HD 6950 being a powerful graphics processor, the Sapphire cooler on this Dirt 3 graphics card is quite a beast as well. There are two fans and six heatpipes with aluminum fins to cool the HD 6950 Cayman. This cooler is even an upgrade from the Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 FleX Edition that boasted just a single fan and is distinctly different from AMD's reference cooler. While there may be two fans for this new graphics card, the overall noise level is still quite low and we found this graphics card to rarely operate at its maximum fan speed.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 core operates at 800MHz and has 1408 Stream processors, 2.25 TeraFLOPs of single-precision compute power, and 562.5 GFLOPs of double precision compute power. This graphics card packs 2GB of 5000MHz GDDR5 video memory with a 256-bit interface. The Radeon HD 6950 supports modern AMD Radeon HD features such as ETQQ (Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing), PowerTune Technology, AMD App Acceleration (OpenCL 1.1 support), and UVD3.

The Radeon HD 6950 graphics card has one dual-link DVI connector, one single-link DVI connector, one HDMI (v1.4a) output, and one DisplayPort (v1.2) output. Next to the single-link DVI connector on the second expansion slot is also a ventilation area for the powerful graphics card's special cooler.

Powering the AMD Radeon HD 6950 requires two external PCI-E 6-pin power connections. This graphics card also, of course, supports AMD CrossFire Technology, but under Linux this multi-GPU capability tends to be of limited benefit.