Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC Dual-X fleX 3GB Graphics Card Review

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Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC Dual-X fleX 3GB Graphics Card Review - eTeknix

We’re big fans of Sapphire, and we’re happy to let that known to our readers, as it allows us to show what products and brands we believe in, and Sapphire are one of the big ones, purely because of the diverse range of products they have in their catalogue.
At the start of the year, the 7000 series of Radeon graphics cards came into full swing with the 7900 and 7800 series from AMD being released and many brands adopting custom solutions. With this in mind, Sapphire developed a new range dubbed as Dual-X. This combined a custom cooler, consisting of a large heatsink, with an array of different sized heatpipes and a dual large active fan solution. This cooler together with dust repelling bearings and a unique blade design keeps the fan speed to a minimum, which gives great thermal properties, while keeping noise to an almost silent operation.
This design was adopted to the 7950 OC Edition, 7970 OC Edition and the 7870 OC Edition and today sees the 7950 OC Edition getting some extra special treatment, with the patented FleX technology, allowing for an even easier Eyefinity solution through use of three DVI connections.
As normal, we will see what the packaging and bundle have to offer in terms of style and added accessories, before we take a closer look at the card, cooler and the technology that it comes inclusive of.
Once we’ve done this, we can start to look at the figures this card gives on our benchmark suite of games and gaming application benchmarks.

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The front of the box is one of the brightest I’ve ever seen, with a feature packed list of features. We’re told this is the Sapphire HD 7950 Dual-X fleX edition, and is also an OverClock Edition with 3GB GDDR5. A army based character takes centre stage on the front of the box with an army based theme in the background.



The rear of the packaging gives us information on this particular card, tells us what’s inside the box and also lists some of the main features of the card.



When we open up the box, the first things that we find are a product registration leaflet, quick installation guide, casebadge sticker, driver installation CD, mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter, DVI to VGA adapter, and CrossFire bridge.



Also included is a 1.8 metre HDMI cable, two Molex to 6-pin PCI-Express power cables, and a DVI to HDMI adapter cable.

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Taking a look at the card head-on, we see a very nice looking card with a dual fan design, hence the Dual-X branding. The card has a completely black shrouding around the fans and heatsink solution. The fleX branding is also present in the bottom right corner of the card.



The card features two large Dual-X branded fans, which sit flush with the fan shrouding to give maximum airflow, while keeping noise and acoustics to a minimum.



On the bottom of the card, we can see how deep the Dual-X cooler goes, with a heatpipe design that incorporates a total of fiver copper heatpipes which spread to different locations of the aluminium heatsink.



Along the top of the card, we can see a standard pair of 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors.



Moving further along the top of the card, towards the rear of the card, we can see two CrossFireX connectors for those wanting to add additional graphics cards in a CrossFireX configuration.



To be a fleX card, the card must be able to power three monitors through DVI, which is where the HDMI-DVI adapter comes in handy and of course the additional DVI connector that a standard 7950 wouldn’t have.

From left to right, we find two mini DisplayPort connectors, a singular HDMI and two DVI connectors, of which one is dual-link, and the other a single-link connector.



Though this card includes a Dual-X cooler, and is part of the fleX series, it also features a pre-factory overclock. From the stock 800MHz core clock, we see this card coming equipped with a 860MHz clock speed, though the memory clock stays at the default 1250MHz. The rest of the specifications stay the same, with 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384 bit memory interface in conjunction with a 28nm Tahiti based core.

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The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results.

Test System:

• Asus Rampage IV Extreme
• Intel Core i7 3960X
• 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
• Corsair H80
• Corsair HX1050W
• Kingston HyperX 256GB SSD
• Lian Li T60
• 3 x AOC E2795VH

We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components.

Games used:

• Aliens Vs Predator
• Batman: Arkham City
• Mafia II
• Metro 2033

Hardware used:

• Plug-in electricity usage monitor
• Sound level meter

Software used:

• 3DMark 11
• HWMonitor
• Unigine Heaven Benchmark
• Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online.



Starting our benchmarks with 3DMark11, we see the 7950 OC Dual-X fleX card giving us some strong results that are only slightly behind the 7870 in both Performance and Extreme presets.

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Heaven 2.5 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items.



Moving over to Unigine Heaven, the Sapphire 7950 OC Dual-X fleX stormed ahead of the reference 7950 and fell just behind the reference 7970.

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Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game.



Moving over to games, AvP gives strong results across all resolutions including Eyefinity at over 40FPS.

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Batman: Arkham City was release late in 2011 as a sequal to Arkham Asylum. The game uses large scale mapping with heavy effects on lighting and the environment along with a lot of tessellation in a fast moving gaming scene. It utilises DirectX 11 for shadows, lighting, reflections and particles to give the best gaming experience possible.



Next up is Batman: Arkham City and within this game, we also saw strong results with the 7950 OC Dual-X fleX, with it coming out on top compared to the other 7950 based cards, with the performance not to distant from the reference 7970.

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Mafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games.



In Mafia II, the 7950 OC Dual-X fleX gave above 30FPS across all resolutions including Eyefinity at 5760×1080.

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Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market.



Ending with Metro 2033, the Sapphire 7950 OC Dual-X fleX was on par with the equally impressive MSI 7950 Twin Frozr III card and was creeping very close to the AMD reference HD 7970.