Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 2GB GDDR5 Dual Fan

Benchmarks

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

For those who like their dystopian futures a little less bombed-out, Deus Ex: Human Revolution provides a slick mix of action, stealth, and social gameplay. Developed in a rare collaborative effort between Eidos Montreal, Square-Enix, and Nixxes, this game challenges both brains and reflexes as it weaves an all too believable tale of humanity in the dawn of the cybernetic age.

While this game may be pretty, it is clearly no challenge for the Sapphire HD 6970 in single-screen mode, posting an average frame rate of 105FPS in both DX9 and DX11 modes.

Activating our vision augments, we move up to Eyefinity mode, where the game still posts a quite-respectable 40FPS average with both renderers.

Thoughts and Conclusion

Getting things set up, I noted a few interesting quirks about the driver disk. For one, it includes manuals for many 4000-series and 5000-series Radeons, but not one that corresponds to the actual card in the box. Also not appearing on the driver CD was the TriXX software Sapphire advertised for overclocking the GPU. Both of these can be obtained online, but it can be frustrating to have to search those things out.

One other very unusual thing was the noise level while this card was in operation. At idle, it is practically inaudible from 1 foot away. Even when driving Metro 2033 at 5040×1050 with all the bells and whistles on, it barely rose above a whisper. The only time I was able to get the fans to spin up to an appreciable speed was during the Furmark burn test, and even that didn’t get them spinning above 50 percent!

If you can afford to do so, playing games in Eyefinity mode is a startling experience. After spending some time playing games in this way, it became clear to me just how narrow a field of view a standard monitor provides, even if it is a widescreen model. It took some getting used to, but once I did, I noticed that I was no longer getting blind-sided by griefers looking to knife me in the ribs. Having decent peripheral vision also cut down greatly on the amount of twitchy back-and-forth mouse-looking I had to do to keep track of what was going on around me.

When you’re not gaming, you’ll also notice that you have a lot more desktop space to work with with a triple monitor setup. If you’re anything like me, you’ll quickly come to appreciate the ability to spread out a bit, and not have to alt-tab quite so much.

At every step of the way, this card has amazed me with its performance, stability, and quiet. You may have a bit of trouble tracking it down, but if you can afford the asking price ($400 + S&H at time of publication), you will be amply rewarded. This is, bar none, the best bang for your buck in video cards right now.

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