Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 Dual Fan Edition

Sapphire HD 6970 Dual Fan Edition review

There are no new GPUs on the immediate horizon, but can Sapphire's Radeon HD 6970 Dual Fan edition make up for that? If you're into some freakish overclocking numbers then maybe it can. The Cayman XT-based HD 6970 is the company's fastest single-GPU based card out of the box. But what if you want it to go even faster, how do you go about it? Well, in the case of AMD's biggest board partner, Sapphire, you replace the PCB with your own design, build in improved power components, throw the reference cooler in the bin and replace it with a custom dual-fan design. Then finally you tweak the twangers off the standard HD 6970's dual BIOS to offer a choice between normal and super-duper, voltage-crazy overclocking. The OC options allow access to higher voltages for the core, faster memory speeds and faster fan speeds. The resulting HD 6970 Dual Fan Edition offers the choice between using the standard clock speeds (880MHz core, 1,375MHz) or, by flicking a switch, and using Sapphire's own TriXX overclocking utility, which is a good deal faster. Keep pushing What's important about this Sapphire HD 6970 is just how much farther can we push the card now that Sapphire has been delving around in it's design.