Final Thoughts and Rating
Let's get the obvious out of the way first; if you can stretch your budget close to £300 and you want to maximise performance, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 670 is our recommended card.
It's in the sub-£250 bracket that AMD's Radeon HD 7870 comes into contention, and at this price point there's arguably no better card on the market. If you're gaming at 1080p and you're hoping to keep power-draw and noise down to a comfortable level, the HD 7870 is a good all-round fit.
Sapphire has taken that promise and tarted it up appropriately. The HD 7870 Flex GHz Edition offers versatile outputs that make it easy to connect three DVI monitors, an overclocked BIOS is in place to offer that extra burst of performance, and the Dual-X cooler is excellent; it runs quiet and keeps the GPU comfortably cool at all times.
There's plenty to like, but AMD's recent price cuts are the big attraction here. Sapphire will put forward a tasty proposition if it brings the HD 7870 Flex GHz Edition to market at around £250, but the card will become truly attractive if/when it nudges closer to the £200 mark.
The Good
Strong 1080p gaming performance
Can power three DVI monitors right out of the box
Dual-X cooler keeps temperature and noise down to a minimum
Can be overclocked at the flick of a switch
The Bad
GeForce GTX 670 is a much faster card, budget permitting
HEXUS Rating
Sapphire HD 7870 Flex GHz Edition
HEXUS Awards
Sapphire HD 7870 Flex GHz Edition
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
[July 20, 2012] Sapphire Technology's Global PR Director Bill Donnelly has issued the following right2reply:
We are very happy that your reviewer effectively found that our card had no bad points at all - of course it is always possible to spend more money to get more performance - in which case the customer can buy any one of our higher performing models!
