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.
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.
