Sapphire HD6950 FleX Packaging/Contents:
The Sapphire 6950 fleX comes neatly packaged in a reflective metallic blue, white and black box with red AMD Radeon logos on every side but the back and bottom. The blue and white are the same colors that you’ll find on their logos and branding.
Packaging of the card itself contains an egg crate hollow with the card wrapped in an anti-static bag, and is cushioned with a black foam insert to keep the card secure in the egg crate type carton. There is also another smaller box which houses the cables and documents.
The package contains:
HD 6950 fleX Video Card
Driver CD with Sapphire Badge Sticker
User Manual
Sapphire Select Club Flier
Cables (listed below)
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Crossfire Interconnect Cable x 1
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HDMI To DVI Adapter x 1
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DVI to VGA Adaptor x 1
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6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable x 2
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Mini DP to DP Adapter x 1
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HDMI 1.4a 1.8 meter cable x 1 (Full Retail only)
The card itself is Black with almost black metallic pin striping on the top giving it a sleek look. The cooling is definitely better than the other reference cards out there with a center mounted fan with extra fins and diameter to help with cooling the Vapor X design. In the center of the fan is the Sapphire logo on a silver mirrored sticker with the AMD Radeon Badge on the left side and “flex edition” written in white on the right side. The side profile of the card shows the Sapphire name in silver when it is installed in a case.
Setup
The setup of the video card was pretty straight forward and easy since my power supply has 2-6 pin adapter power plugs and my motherboard has a couple PCI-E x16 slots. Once the card was physically installed and the machine powered on only 2 of the 3 monitors powered up. I
used the Setup CD that came with the card to install the drivers and AMD’s Catalyst Control Center (CCC) to help set up the displays, once the driver was installed the third monitor then showed an image. Going into AMD catalyst under desktop management I was easily able to select to turn the other displays into extended mode and rearrange them in the software to match what I had on the desktop. AMD makes this fairly simple and straightforward telling you to click on the corresponding monitor icon that matches whichever one they turn blue on the screen, once you do that for 2 monitors it automatically figures out the 3rd. Unfortunately, Eyefinity Setup wasn’t as intuitive and there was no Eyefinity manual to explain how to create an Eyefinity setup, but a quick Google search resulted in learning that under the same desktop management, you had to click on one of the display’s black triangle to bring up the option to “create a group” which then allows you to group 3 monitors into an Eyefinity solution (it is important to note that as of the Catalyst 11.4 preview Drivers, Eyefinity group setup is easier, with its own tab and step-by step-procedure). Also thanks to Catalyst profiles, you can have hotkeys to swap between extended and Eyefinity setups if you so desire.
Sapphire HD6950 FleX Benchmarking:
Test System
The test system is by no means extreme, it is more of a high end gamer’s delight while still trying to maintain a budget, but overall I think it is a good representation of what a smart gaming consumer would purchase. The specifications are:
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Intel I7 875k Processor (O.C. to 3.5 Ghz)
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4gb of Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz DDR3 Ram
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Intel 40gb SSD drive for OS
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1TB Hitachi Hard Drive for game installs
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Windows 7 HP 64Bit OS
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CoolerMaster Silent Pro M 1000Watt Power Supply
Testing Process
I tried to maintain a good balance of testing DX 11 games and using 3D Mark graphics tests to compare the cards in different scenarios. Without an in-game benchmark tool it is difficult to recreate the same path and line of sight with different cards so I was really limited to using particular games. As with all numbers, consumers need to be aware of the different ways games are developed and which reference card they’ve been optimized for, some games simply run better with a certain card designer. Keeping that in mind it is also wise to consider driver updates and software enhancements that alter a cards performance in the future, sometimes up to 15% frames-per-second (fps) improvements in certain games, the 6900 series still being fairly new, and the 6950 fleX especially being just released I know we can expect to see future optimization from the AMD Catalyst Camp. After testing single monitor use, I went into some recent game releases to do some further fps tests while using Eyefinity grouping.
