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Battlefield 3 receives its own Sapphire graphics card

by Alistair Lowe on 25 October 2011, 10:39

Tags: Sapphire

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Just as Battlefield 3 is about to begin hitting the shops, SAPPHIRE has announced its ‘SAPPHIRE HD 6970 BF3 Special Edition’ high-end AMD based graphics card.

 

The first and perhaps the most important attribute of this card is that it comes bundled with a free copy of the Battlefield 3 game and so, if you’re looking to purchase this new graphics card, you may want to cancel your pre-order and save yourself some pennies!

This card comes equipped with a Dual BIOS, pre-programmed with ‘normal’ standard 6970 clock settings but also far more interestingly a ‘boost’ setting offering a 930MHz core clock, increased core voltage, increased fan speed and increased overclocking limits.

Sapphire BF3 Special Edition

Though only a 50MHz boost, this can go a long way in a graphics card as you’re boosting 1536 individual stream processors. The raised core voltage should, one would think, make further overclocking efforts a little more stable by default and SAPPHIRE makes advanced overclocking possible with its TriXX tool.

 

To further bolster the card’s overclocking capability SAPPHIRE has included its own take on Vapor Chamber technology, Vapor-X, a feature now found as standard on most high-end NVIDIA graphics cards but has not been a necessity on the traditionally cooler AMD cards. Vapor Chamber technology does a great job of taking heat away from the GPU quickly and can work wonders on stability when performing extreme overclocking. As you generally receive more cooling for each of your fan RPMs, you can typically reach a better cooling to noise ratio than on a standard cooling solution.

Potentially very useful for those with existing monitors or who are tied down with a budget, SAPPHIRE has included its FleX technology, enabling three monitor Eyefintity completely over DVI with no additional adapters required to convert from Displayport.

Currently there’s no word on the pricing of this unit, but with Battlefield 3 due out on the 28th in Europe, we likely won’t have to wait very long to find out; though perhaps the details are coming through a little late for those in the US, who will be receiving their copies of Battlefield 3 today.

 




HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Looks good depending on pricing, would rather have a 6950 with dual bios though. Can we expect a TES V: Skyrim card, or a Diablo 3/Starcraft 2: heart of the swarm down the line as well? One way of beating piracy :p
Yeah, that is an interesting option. When I got my 8800GTS 512Mb I got Neverwinter Nights 2 for free which is what was the deciding factor in my purchase over other cards. Since then I've seen fewer cards come with games bundled and it's a shame. Perhaps the “politics” involved in preventing other manufacturers getting the same game bundled with their hardware is a stumbling block but I hope something can be worked out because I'd love some free games with my hardware.

Just imagine having Batman free with all nVidia cards(like you get at Scan, but everywhere) and the same for AMD with perhaps Skyrim or the next Dirt game. That would be awesome.
AMD were giving SHOGUN2 for Free for a limited time with purchase of AMD gfx cards.
Some AMD cards also came with DIRT3 and NVIDIA cards have come with Batman and HAWX2
The AMD DiRT 3 promotion seemed to be for almost all of the mid to high end cards. I bought a PowerColor 6870 for a build recently that came with DiRT 3 and the new Deus Ex! Not bad to get around £60 worth of games with a £120 graphics card!
Those are great promotions but were limited ones. I didn't notice any bundled games when I was choosing my graphics card in June 2011 and there really should of been.

I remember seeing bundled game promotions all the time back in 2007-2008, I got both Empire: Total War and Dirt 2 through such promotions and I wouldn't have played my favourite RTS otherwise.

I think going forward there should be more emphasis put on adding value to a hardware purchase with bundled software(games or useful applications). It should also be sustained throughout the year and not only every now and then when a new game/application is released.