Sapphire HD 6950 2GB DiRT 3 Video Card Review @ HardOCP

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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Sapphire HD 6950 2GB DiRT 3 Video Card Review - Overclocking a video card provides a better gameplay experience, or so every enthusiast hopes. Today we have the Sapphire HD 6950 2GB DiRT 3 Special Edition on our gaming rig to see how well it performs and overclocks using Sapphire's TRIXX Tweaking utility. Will this overclock yield a better gameplay experience?
 
The sad part, is this new revision of the card is blocked from unlocking the lanes and no longer has the dual bios.
 
As an early adopter of this model number.Couple of questions. Can this be flashed to a 6970. Without raising my gpu voltage causing extra heat higher wattage and having a dustbuster. Just a reminder of the flash increase without doing the other tasks. GPU=880 and memory=1375.
 
LordCalin said:
The sad part, is this new revision of the card is blocked from unlocking the lanes and no longer has the dual bios.
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I know and most the reference card's are 200-300$ , if you can find them and lower il be stoked though! Tried to find a cheap one as the basic 6950's and no luck. But still Crossfire 6950's are decent though as they outperform single card 570gtx + more.
 
Uncle said:
As an early adopter of this model number.Couple of questions. Can this be flashed to a 6970. Without raising my gpu voltage causing extra heat higher wattage and having a dustbuster. Just a reminder of the flash increase without doing the other tasks. GPU=880 and memory=1375.
Click to expand...

nope... they finally caught on and disabled the ability to flash it to 6970, so no shader unlocks, and the only overclocking can be done with voltage tweaking.
 
berettagtkid69420 said:
I know and most the reference card's are 200-300$ , if you can find them and lower il be stoked though! Tried to find a cheap one as the basic 6950's and no luck. But still Crossfire 6950's are decent though as they outperform single card 570gtx + more.
Click to expand...

yeah with the inclusion of dirt 3 the price went up... for a while from distribution we could get the card for around 220 (cdn, so like usual we pay more even tho our dollar is higher :/) and sell it for around 248... now that it's got dirt 3 with it, it costs us 269 from distro and retails 298.
 
LordCalin said:
nope... they finally caught on and disabled the ability to flash it to 6970, so no shader unlocks, and the only overclocking can be done with voltage tweaking.
Click to expand...

So to run this card in crossfire would I have to flash it back to a 6950.
 
Uncle said:
So to run this card in crossfire would I have to flash it back to a 6950.
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possibly not, it might just run as crossfired 6950's even without flashing back since with the 69xx series cards catalyst never differentiated between the two, when I took an already working system and flashed it to unlock no drivers needed re-installed, nor did it detect as a new card.
 
From all the reviews I've read it seems it might not be time for me to upgrade my 5850 with the resolution I play at (1920x1080).

I'll be playing DA2 fairly soon and Deus Ex revolution when it comes out. If the 6950 wasn't playing DA2 at highest specs at 1920x1200 it makes me wonder though.


Opinions?
 
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I have it. Great card. Smokes my old GTX 460. P22,100 in Vantage overclocked. Runs cool and quiet. I have my own fan profile to keep it that way. TriXX is a nice little app.
 
So I have a 6950 and its one of the newer powercolor ones with 2 fans. I couldn't unlock the shaders, but at 1.25vcore I can easily get 930mhz and have it 100% stable even running bitcoin, while it will run @ 950mhz fully stable in any games. Is that typical for 6950's? I am leaving the ram at stock 1250Mhz as this card isnt really memory constrained and I didnt see big benefits from overclocking the memory, so I figured I would save my power budget for the GPU.

I made a custom bios with RBE and set the voltage to 1.25 for the high clock speed setting and also adjusted the fan slope so the fan is quite a bit more aggressive. Card still gets pretty hot (90C+) but runs fine.

My core i7 (1366) also runs just fine at 4Ghz @ 90c.

Honestly I think people are a bit scared of high temps. I remember back in the P3 or Athlon XP days, 65-70c was the limit or they would crash period, but modern silicon seems to be a lot better.
 
the thing is I like nvidia drivers better, so if I were to get this type of card....what is the best ATI driver version currently? and how well you think AMD/ATI had improved their drivers lately?
 
Lets see. I have ran cards from everyone, going all the way back to a Riva 128, including several 3dfx cards along the way.

IMHO The AMD/ATI drivers are just fine these days, my last 3 setups (dual 4850's, single 4870, 6950) have all been ATI. Before that I had an 8800GTS, so I haven't been in the nVidia camp for a while now.

Honestly I think it's pretty much a wash at this point. I think AMD/ATI cards have a better performance/value ratio, while if you have big bucks you can get the top performance with nVidia.
 
It's not fair to compare an overclocked 6950 to a non-overclocked GTX 560 Ti. I can overclock my EVGA FPB GTX 560 Ti to 1000 Mhz ( @ 1065 mV ) and it performs the same as a GTX 570 then. My 3DMark 2008/Vantage P score is 21,748 and this is on a lowly dual core E7200 @ 4.0 Ghz with 4 GB ram DDR-2 845 Mhz!! Would be even higher with a new quad platform. So yes, the 6950 overclocked is very impressive, but so is the mighty GTX 560 Ti !! :p :D

My card is only $235 on newegg.com right now!! : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130604

There is also a $25 MIR, so card is only $210 after the MIR!! Wicked deal...

Just use MSi's excellent Afterburner free utility to overclock it and adjust gpu voltage, and create a custom fan speed profile, works awesome! Latest nVidia driver is rock solid in all the latest games too!

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

:cool:
 
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Picked one of these up the other day for $245 (AR) at Newegg with the free copy of Dues Ex, which I sold for $35 since I already have the game making the card essentially $210. I was wanting to test the thought that I would have some luck like some others with this card unlocking the shaders, but I had a different bios on mine, that I could not modify with RBE.

Still, it is actually a good clocker. Stable (so far) at 975Mhz core and 1380Mhz Memory @ 1.18v. Wish it could go a bit higher, 1Ghz should have been achievable.

At his speed it actually is as fast or a bit faster than my unlocked reference 6950 that I sold a while back. It topped out at only 900Mhz core and 1410 memory.

Update; Had someone send me the other bios, but it still would not unlock my shaders, so it appears my gpu is likely cut.
 
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I had mine for a couple weeks now and love them....... UNLOCKED & CLOCKED!

61k7yHOLnxL.jpg
 
If you want an almost sure card that will unlock, get the Sapphire 6950 Toxic edition. They're getting what seems to be a 75% unlock rate with that card.
 
Wonder how that OC card would have done when the ram is running on its stock.
Couldve calculated the rendering fraction that's affected/limited by the engine clock
amdhal.png
 
Digital_Edge said:
My Sapphire 6950 Toxic edition I just received from Newegg did not unlock :(
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Read a post somewhere that it struggled to unlock bit eventually got unlocked after the third try. Think it was over at techpowerup with a complete explenation what he did. Just google it
 
Well, I looked at my second bios on my toxic in RBE says its 6970 shaders but shows 1408 in GPU-Z and Trixx from what I've read this means the gpu laser locked. :mad: Still really happy with the card great overclocks running 938core and 1450mem stable. Haven't taken it higher yet but I'm sure it can.
 
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