Overclocking
Sapphire reckons the reference-beating cooler paves the way for some superlative overclocks, helped by the fact that a greater voltage range is available on the BP2 setting.
Increasing the core voltage from 1.112V to 1.250V - the most we'd go without worrying about short-term reliability implications - we reached a final speed of 1,200MHz core and 6,600MHz memory.
We then re-ran Aliens vs. Predator and Crysis 2, to see just what effect the extra speed had.
This title is an AMD benefit for the most part. The extra oomph takes the Sapphire card past a dual-GPU GTX 590 at the 1080p setting.
Running better on NVIDIA hardware, the rampaging OC Dual-X card is able to match a GTX 680's performance in Crysis 2.
The downside of such frequency/voltage manipulation is direct consequences for power, temperatures and noise. Our records show that the system routinely pulled over 300W from the mains - an increase of 75W over stock - the temperature rose to 81°C, fans ramped up to 3,200rpm, and the associated noise level whizzed up to 44.5dB.
