The HD 6870 DiRT 3 edition is a beast. While we did not particularly love DiRT 3 as a game, a free copy is more than welcome for fans to experience the power of the AMD Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 DiRT 3 edition. While we already reviewed the HD 6870 base samples through AMD, and then add-in contact reviews including Sapphire’s 6870 line, this special OCed edition was worth a look for the people who have been e-mailing regarding Sapphire products on top of VisionTek lines.

First off, the packaging itself is beautiful. Sapphire at this point has shown us that they create packaging that is amazing in terms of their quality of build and the fan structure. We also popped it open for good measure, and loved the consistency of the thermal compound, which most video cards kind of skim (NVIDIA sometimes).

The OC comes at 920MHz which is 20MHz up on the default 900MHz HD 6870 clock while the clock rate of the RAM remains the same at 4200 QDR (DDR on 2 channel bits). Admittedly, there is not much to say about this card that has not necessarily been said. Is it worth the slight increase in price? This is really up to someone to decide. From a mathematical point of speaking, higher Hz means higher clock frequencies. 20Hz can make all the difference every second for every minute (1800Hz/min).  Should consumers want something that is quiet while being a little faster, this is definitely a step up from a normal 6870 even if not by a lot.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex Edition 1GB is the best card to get for anyone looking for the flexibility of DualPort graphics and the integration of DVI standards for the TDMS streams capable to also transmit over HDMI. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex Edition 1GB video card is affordable, runs incredibly well, and maintains a level of quality for future-oriented people who do not want to upgrade that is exceptional.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex Edition 1GB tested extremely well as the HD 6870, providing the same 900Mhz clock rate along with the 1GB of onboard video RAM to make for a terrific gaming experience. Benchmarks through FutureMark suite and PassMark revealed numbers that rivaled other cards comparing to the GTX 480 by performing a solid 10-15 fps higher in games such as RIFT and more.

To get straight to the point, for sake of brevity in repeating a 6870 review, the Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex Edition 1GB offers a few different things. It gives gamers and hardcore graphics enthusiasts the 6000 feature set along with the support for the five monitors. The DisplayPorts allow for 2 monitors, while the HDMI and 2 DVI (Single-Link-D + Dual Link-I) gives consumers the flexibility for larger screens to manage their workflow. In terms of this angle, that is all the 6870 Flex does. It is certainly not a setup for gamers in any way that makes it more special than the 6870 normal editions, so if you are looking to game on 3-5 monitors, forget it. Sapphire has definitely established that they know what they are doing, and giving consumers flexibility not just in the home but also in the workplace. There is no need for dual single-core GPU’s or Quad-SLI for this setup. You can have it with AMD, on one card, at an incredible price.

The Sapphire Radeon Toxic Edition HD 6850 is surprisingly a card that is simply a steal to PC and hardcore gaming enthusiasts worldwide. While the HD 6870 may have more stream processors and 900~913/1050 MHz ratio of core:memory speed  the Sapphire Radeon Toxic Edition HD 6850  performs at equal level (+/- 2 fps) in every test performed for the price point difference at 1GB memory. The custom PCB along with the 1.7 billion transistor core reveals a true overclocking power that does not limit the life of the product, but ensures a lengthy return for something that can be underestimated because of the digits after the HD. With more performance per dollar and quality per performance value, the Sapphire Radeon HD Toxic 6850 is a must-buy for anyone looking to upgrade to the next solution of CrossFireX domination and pure statistic performance per watt.

The external packaging reveals the fate of a card that has supernatural powers, as a blue-cloaked male figure reveals an inner secret to the core. The technologies this card utilizes include DirectX 11, CrossFireX Technology, HDMI 1.4a, Display Port 1.2 and AMD Eyefinity technology. The contents of the package itself come with the card, revealing a powerful weight similar to 6870 reference cards and differ from the normal 6850 contents by offering a changed chassis model along with a cool steel blue appearance with polished gun-metal black. The Sapphire Radeon Toxic HD 6850 reveals a truly contagious appeal that fans of Sapphire Technologies love.

Overclocking can sometimes be seen as a bad thing among technical-enthusiasts, especially those that cannot sadly afford to keep changing out their parts every 6 months. Luckily for hardcore PC enthusiasts, Sapphire alleviates the concerns and reveals that overclocking does not come at a price, but moreover comes with a satisfaction that is venerable. The Sapphire Radeon Toxic HD 6850 performed exquisitely well throughout the tests we put it through from titles such as Mass Effect 2, Grand Theft Auto IV EFLC + Original (latest patches), Dead Space 2 Early PC Build. With every test we performed within the 68xx series, the 6850 followed within 2 fps below the 6870. While 2 fps may seem significant, the overclocking is where the card shines, pushing to a 1000MHz core clock and a 1200 MHz memory speed for fps that beats the 6870 reference speeds across XFX, Diamond, and MSI. Temperature wise, the card idles at a decent 77 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Sapphire Radeon Toxic HD 6850 is the perfect card for gamers looking to get a great gift under their tree this holiday season.  Without too much of a hole in the wallet, consumers can seek the Toxic HD 6850 as the perfect DirectX 11 card that will save money and deliver more power than the leading competitor in the same series in CrossFire and out.  The Sapphire Radeon Toxic HD 6850 will be sure to deliver exactly the gaming needs for every frame output.

The AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 brings a new era for increased level-enthusiasts to ramp up their gaming platforms to Microsoft’s DirectX 11 specification, while maintaining the core platform compatibility to use DVI-D, DVI-I, and finally HDMI for newer LCD monitors. The launch of the Radeon 5000 series has brought with it a change for consumers to meet not only a great price point, but benefit with the core integration of having features such as 1440 stream processors for every GFLOP unit and much more. Incredible design aside of the Toxic HD 5850, the AMD GPU launch of this latest card definitely quenches the thirst for a handful of enthusiasts from overclocking especially to pure stability per MHz increased.

The AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 looks incredible than the standard reference cards with a Cypress chipcore that is sleek and integrated on the main board. AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850’s comes packed with 1 GB GDDR5 memory, heralded by the 4800 series, and packs 1 gigabyte and over 2 TeraFLOPs of processing power to give an enhanced edge on a 256-bit bus width. The Toxic is naturally overclocked to 765MHz / 1125MHz and Sapphire will be launching the Vapor-X model elsewhere in Europe. One of the best features of design for the ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is the cooler, which is a well-done cooler that is quieter than the standard heat pipe arrangement.  Compared to reference coolers, the ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 cooler has a bimodal air distribution as the air goes through the front and rear of the card and not all out from the back, thereby dissipating the heat much more efficiently. The open-ended design makes cooling more efficient than having a fan behind the card for increased cooling.  The ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is definitely a greater card than the AMD reference cards for this line.

ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 becomes a strong overclocking card with the OC label at the top of the box. With no toolset for overvolting, the volts remained at 1.088v. Using the AMD GPU Clock Toolset, we overclocked this to 145MHz on the core clock frequency and pushed an extra 80MHz on the VRAM frequency to 1195MHz. These overclocks are already in addition to the Toxic card default overclock set, which causes the games to be incredibly fast. The stability and quality of overclocking with the AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is simply incredible for the price.

Power consumption efficiency in the Toxic 5530 is also incredibly well done.  The Toxic at 895MHz/1195MHz only adds a mere 25W and is still under the reference specifications released by AMD. In addition to great overclocking, the ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 has very light decibel load to only 6 dB for sound at full-load while idle and maximum temperatures go from 36 degrees Celsius to 74 degrees.

The ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is simply an incredible buy for consumers looking to get the Cypress chip power with DirectX 11 support, Eyefinity power for multi-display processing, incredible overclocking and HDMI onboard output for an incredible power suite on a card that is ingenious as much as it is stable and prurient to enthusiast needs. What sort of release AMD is planning past the AMD ATI Radeon 5970 chipset is still to be seen and remains very promising.

Back when we did our review on the Crossfire 4870’s, we were left utterly impressed by the sheer amount of productivity and results that provided for an effulgence of gaming pleasure over even the latest of the Nvidia offering of the GTX 280’s and GTX 260’s with value of power and price. It seems AMD is setting the barriers this generation, and trying to cross them over and over again. With the introduction of the HD 4850 1GB and HD 4870 1GB, AMD had amped up the offering for the initial consumer price point models. Now, they’ve just broken their own barrier with the latest innovation of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 series. As the first consumer graphics card with 2 GB of memory, and the first card to implement a 512bit GDDR5 memory architecture through the inordinate amount of pixel pipelines, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card stoically dominates the competition in a whole new level for the enthusiast gamers.

We wanted to make something people can love, and feel secure with. – Dirk Meyer, President, AMD: Commenting to WhatIfGaming on the HD 4870 X2 card.

The Radeon 4800 series has many people excited since we published our review on the 4850 to our in-depth exclusive reveal first on the 4870. Now, today we bring a review on the 4870 with dual goodness. That’s right. We have 2 of these powerhouses from AMD, which reveals the introduction of the highly desirable and now most successful GDDR5 memory architecture. A complete power machine, the ATI Radeon 4870 is the most valuable card to date in terms of the Radeon evolution and Ruby keeps looking sexier by the minute. Stable temperatures, amazing performance on all DX 10.1 games with many XGA resolutions, make not only a very formidable card series in general, but a great contender as the 4870 and one that is set out to win against the competition this time around.

AMD is proudly bringing PC gamers 1.0 TeraFLOP Graphics Performance, with a single GPU that consumes only 110W of power in the HD 4850. Going head to head with the 8800GTX, 8800GTS & GT, and 9600GT series of cards. Developing a new TeraScale graphics engine, AMD is excited to deliver an impassive experience for gaming. With enhanced anti-aliasing 24X (AA) and AF, gamers will find a new realism more improved than previous versions of cards that all had AA and AF flickering sporadic problems. You’ve read our Cinema 2.0 coverage and are waiting for our detailed article on the latest 4800 series line, including ATI Radeon HD 4870 details. Now, we want to reveal one part with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 that should provide a glimpse into the new series line. With power that supports DX 10.1 fully unlike the GTX 200′s, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 brings efficiency together against the competition through features such as ATI Powerplay and ATI Avivo HD to give gamers a more enhanced experience all around.

Let’s take a look at the key features:

• 512MB GDDR3 Memory

• Core Clock: 625MHz

• Single Slot

• 2.0 Gbps
• 110W Power Requirement
• 256-bit memory interface
• DirectX 10.1 Support
• 24x custom filter AA and high performance AF
• ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for scalable performance
• PCI-E 2.0 support
• ATI Avivio HD video and display technology for Blu-ray and 7.1 surround sound support with On-Chip HDCPd
• ATI Powerplay

Let’s go on to the test system.

The 8800 GTX has represented the most powerful graphics card that sane people were willing to buy for years. The 8800 Ultra is slightly faster, but at a cost of over $600 it is reserved for those with gross amounts of disposable income. From the start, we were able to run SLI ATX and get incredible performance. Nowadays the GTX is starting to become long in the tooth as far as graphics cards go, 15 months is a very long time with nothing faster to come along. The latest games are certainly pushing even a pair of GTX’s to unplayable levels at higher resolutions. So what are we owners of 30” LCD monitors to do to get playable frames at our native resolution? Enter 3-way SLI, a fully functional and much sorted extension of the Quad SLI. NVIDIA has been hard at work on multi-GPU performance and with the limitation of only 3fps pre-render in Direct X9 and below out of the way in Direct X10, the stage is set for extremely expensive graphics solutions. For those who do not remember, Quad SLI was plagued by the fact that for the money, it was a horrible investment. It offered very marginal performance benefits in all but a select few applications and thus never adopted as the true high-end solution.

Today we will be seeing how far the technology has come along as well as what it requires to get this level of performance. Triple SLI looks great on paper, check that, it looks good on paper as long as you’re not referring to the green sheets in your wallet. The requirements are an NVIDIA SLI certified motherboard with 3 16x PCI-E slots, currently consists of either a 680i, or 780i motherboard, which round out Intel based offerings. The ill-fated AMD 4×4 platforms should also support it provided you can get an SLI adaptor that will work with the spacing. None of these boards is below the price of $200 until you cash in the mail-in-rebate. So, time to pop out the 780i for this baby, as we have yet to receive the latest 790i (more on that later).

The test setup consists of a QX9770 and stock coolers to maintain it all. For this example, we ran the core benchmark of the game you all most wanted to know about—Crysis.

Click to zoom in

SLI overall added tremendous playability, but tri-SLI expanded upon it. NVIDIA’s 3-way SLI indeed works simply put. The problem however is that in this instance it is based on technology that is approaching the end of its life. The 8800 GTX and Ultra have all but been replaced by the 8800 GTS 512MB and the 9000 series cards have launched. The Quad SLI launch of the 9800GX2 should undercut the cost of either Triple GTX’s or Ultra’s and perform on par or better. So really the only way this is going to be of benefit to anyone is if you’ve already got a 680i or 780i and a pair of GTX’s or Ultra’s.

Today we are testing the new ASUS EAH3850 TOP and EN8800GS TOP graphics cards in a head to head comparison. These $200 US graphics cards deliver serious performance and come with overclocked factory settings, and improved cooling solutions. We expect more from GPU manufacturers this time around. The most recent card we have with us today is the GeForce 9600 GT, which tunes in great. But alas, there is tons of competition on the other brim as the HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards have also been able to remain very competitive. Currently the Radeon HD 3870 is priced between $190-$200 US while the GeForce 9600 GT costs roughly $170-$180 US, and both produce very similar results.

With everything to boot, the Radeon HD 3850 happens to feature an improved design and factory overclocking. The ASUS EAH3850 TOP/G/HTDI/512M/A looks as though it is the best Radeon HD 3850 graphics card we have seen to date, but this enhanced ASUS version does not come cheap. The EAH3850 TOP is no ordinary Radeon HD 3850 graphics card, featuring high speed 0.8ns GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.9GHz, along with a heavily overclocked core and an improved cooling design. The default Radeon HD 3850 specifications include 1656MHz memory and a 668MHz core frequency. ASUS smacked on their big boots and has boosted the core frequency by 9%, as the EAH3850 TOP comes clocked at 730MHz. The memory frequency has boosted by 15% which will also improve the performance of this Radeon HD 3850 graphics card, giving customers the largest bang for their buck. ASUS also designed a custom cooler for the EAH3850 TOP, which not only performs better than the standard single slot cooler, but is quieter as well. Unlike the standard reference cooler, the ASUS “Glaciator” fan and heatsink combo does not accommodate for the eight memory chips that are clocked at 1900MHz. Luckily, there is a cooler over the circuitry. So props to them for that. The EAH3850 TOP measures 21cm long by 9.7cm tall, 2cm shorter than the Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 8800 GT graphics cards. In the package ASUS has included a D-Sub adapter and a HDMI adapter, while the card supports dual DVI out and a TV output (S-Video to Composite) onboard. It also supports HDCP and HDTV, and comes with an HDTV-out cable, which is handy for you capture freaks out there that do not think TiVo is a great option.

Just like the EAH3850 TOP, the EN8800GS TOP features an improved cooling design with overclocked settings for the core and memory. The GeForce 8800 GS is designed to operate at 550MHz, while the GDDR3 memory specification is 1.6GHz. Once again ASUS has boosted the core speed by 9% reaching 600MHz, while the memory frequency has been increased by just 6.25% reaching 1.7GHz. ASUS clarifies that this overclock will allow their GeForce 8800 GS graphics card to produce over 10,000pts in 3Dmark06. Not a bad deal at all. Since the GeForce 8800 GS supports just 384MB of memory, there are just six chips onboard. Known as the Hynix HY5RS123235B FP-11 chips, they are designed to operate at 1.8GHz according to Hynix, which is surprising given that ASUS is only running them at 1.7GHz on the EN8800GS TOP. So, it becomes interesting to see how much further the EN8800GS TOP is pushed before stability becomes an issue.

Our featured benchmark is Crysis for this card. We will let the pictures do all the talking.

Overall the EAH3850 TOP took lead by 20%, which equates to 3 fps. Not really worth the extra blow of cash, but it does what it says.

Here, again the TOP takes lead while the GS falls behind.

What next? Time to overclock the puppies to see the big difference in core stability.

The ASUS EN8800GS TOP core overclocked, definitely. Just not what we hoped as it reached 2.17GHz. Not bad, but not that amazing given the core features. The ASUS EAH3850 TOP is limited by the Catalyst drivers that capped at 790MHz for the core. Damn. We discovered the reason a bit after, and found the EAH3850 TOP to overclock pass the 840MHz core speed.

Both graphics cards are impressive, as both make use of the ASUS Glaciator fan and heatsink, while the EAH3850 TOP sits on a nice red PCB the EN8800GS TOP gets a blue PCB. There is nothing remotely generic about these two products including the price. But, the winner by far is the EAH3850 TOP on this one.

The ECS N8800GT-256MX is a perfect card for those looking at bang for the buck. It appears to be a reference 8800 GT with a different heat sink, but it is not. The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. NVIDIA Forceware 169.28 beta drivers were used on all of the GeForce 8800 series graphics cards, and 174.74 used for the 9800 GTX (174.74 drivers will not install on the GeForce 8800 GTX series). ATI Catalyst 8.3 drivers were used for all ATI cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used. Memory timings were set to 1000MHz 4-5-4-15. The XFX GeForce 8800 GTX were standard models and the GeForce 8800 GTS were the Palit 1GB Sonic SLI Video Cards.

Sandra: 112,323,322 Results. (No graph on this one)

Overall speaking of performing well, the heat sink/fan combo are great. I was impressed with how quiet it was at idle and full load, never getting above a whisper. The cooling provided at these low noise levels was stellar, keeping load temperatures below 60c which is a task the reference heatsink is not up to.