Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1 GB DDR5 DL-DVI-I/SL-DVI-D/HDMI/Dual Mini DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 100314-2SR

I received this card a few days ago for a great deal from amazon with rebate and gift card. I researched a lot of different video cards and almost went with a HD6950 or Nvidia 560Ti but I felt their additional cost over this card was not worth the small amount of extra FPS (especially if I decide to overclock it later).The card arrived nicely packaged with the usual additional cables and adapters that Sapphire like to pack in (nice to see an HDMI). The hologram of the busty armored chick on the box was pretty cool and kept me amused for a good minute or so (ooooh, holograms!) A lot of people bemoan the 2 year limited warranty on this card, but honestly, 2 years from now most people will upgrade their cards to something faster anyway. It seems from most places I researched that Sapphire cards are the most popular even though there are comments that customer support is not always satisfactory. Hopefully I will never find out, my brother has had a Sapphire HD5850 (reference) for over a year now and its been solid. Will update later if I receive the rebate, supposedly many people never receive these from Sapphire. I can attest that I never received a rebate from Diamond (hence did not buy from them on this round) but did from Corsair (their PSU's rock and I had great support when my original PSU failed)Considering this is a non-reference card I was expecting better cooling from it. It idles at around 41C and when pushing it in Furmark to the max it goes close to 90C (auto fan profile). However, you can use the Sapphire Trixx tool to create custom fan profiles to override the auto fan mode to get better but louder cooling.I set up a profile and for general gaming (Crysis, Mass Effect 2, Dirt 2 etc) it hangs around 65-70C (fan speed~35%) which is not too bad.My system specs:Windows 7 64Bit SP1Core2Duo CPU E8400 [email protected] Ghz,G-Skill 4GB DDR2-800 Memory,DFI-Lanparty DK-P35-T2 MB.Corsair HX-650 PSUCoolermaster Cosmos case stock fansI upgraded from an HD3870 which was a real bottleneck in my system. It is possible that I may have a limiting factor in the PCI express lane of the motherboard which is not 2.0, simply 16X. However, frame rates are not too far behind modern systems which suggests the system hardware is not too limiting on the video card.Frame rates for fairly demanding games are very solid (all at 1680X1050 Res):Crysis - 40FPS Avg @ Very high settings no AA, 37 FPS 4XAA@very highDirt 2 - Ultra settings, 8XAA 58FPS Avg (Vsync off, if on it really lowers frame rates to unplayable)Dead space 2 - 137FPS avg at very high settingsMass Effect 2 - Vsync on limits to 60FPS which never seem to drop, all setting maxedOlder games play so smooth I feel like my monitor will just slide away from me (games like HL2-E2 and Fallout 3 look very sharp with 8XAA)This card should be future proof for the bevy of games to be released this year and next (Mass effect 3, Duke Nukem forever, Max Payne 3 etc)Well worth the upgrade, and it will be interesting to see how much I can OC if I run into slowdown in the future.Oh, no driver issues or crashes so far. I have had a lot of luck with ATI cards and drivers, have not done Nvidia since the Ge-Force 3 days..Pro's:-Great price-Fast performance in all games to date-Nice feature set, should be future proof for this year and the nextCon's:-Runs hot on default fan profiles, gets fairly loud on custom profile to keep temps down. However, it is by no means intrusive (quite a bit quieter than a previous gen Xbox360 for comparison)-Fan shroud was taller than my HD3870 which fowled one of my MB fan headers, had to relocate the fan power to a 3pin PSU adaptor, no big dealHappy customer!UPDATE: I did finally receive the rebate from Sapphire, even though it was 18 days past their maximum processing date.

My previous set-up was a Sapphire Radeon 4850 paired with a Core2Duo @ 3.0Ghz. Since my processor is kind of dated, I didn't plan on updating my GPU until after first replacing the CPU. However, after installing my sister's 6850 into my computer for testing purposes, and noticing a huge improvement, I decided to go ahead and throw in this badboy when it went on sale for $159 (after rebate). This has allowed me to play at max settings on the majority of games I own, for a very small investment. However, the 3Ghz core2duo will bottleneck this card in some situations, specifically CPU-intensive tasks such as PhysX, post-processing, shadows, etc. But it's really not that big of a deal.Pros:-Looks great and matches my blue motherboard and copper cpu heatsink very nicely-Excellent performer for the price (although not as good of a cost/power ratio as the 6850, absent a sale)-Very quiet at idle-Runs ice-cold compared to my 4850 (50c idle compared to 67c)-Eyefinity is awesome-Low power consumption-About the same length as my old 4850, but the power cord location made it a better fit in my caseCons:-Without a sale you're paying quite a bit more than the 6850, without a huge difference in performance, especially when paired with an older CPU-It's louder than my old 4850 at full load, but just barelyTL;DR: Amazing card, only fan noise under heavy load and the 6850's better value prevent a five star rating.

First, getting the card to fit into my midtower case took about 1 hour of fabrication. I have a Raid-10 setup with 4 drives. I had to put two of the drives in the two diskette slots. (I guess that tells you how old my case it ... but then again, it's just a case. All of the interior electronics have been replaced multiple times.)Next, the driver install, which was an adventure. I have a new, clean installation of Windows 7 64-bit and was trying to upgrade from an Asus IEH4340. My system is pretty straightforward, with an Intel DP45SG motherboard and Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 3 GHz CPU and 8 GB of memory.First of all, I found that I could not hook up multiple screens to this card on the first install. When I did, only one of the screens would show a portion of the windows desktop (probably the upper right corner), but I had no way to scroll down to the lower left, where the start button is. The other attached screen remained dead. Loading the driver for the first time with only one monitor hooked up to the card was the way to go. As soon as the driver installed and I rebooted, all of my previous settings were still there. At that point, I could simply plug in the second monitor and I was good to proceed with my adventure.But not so fast. On my first go around, I threw in the install CD and began installing the Sapphire / ATI / Catalyst drivers. Well, apparently Windows 7 was trying to also install its own version of the drivers. The two clashed and created a horrendous mess. Also, the Sapphire instructions say that you don't have to reboot unless the system says you have to reboot. Bad advice. I found that I had to reboot every time a piece of software was installed, regardless of whose software it is (Windows or ATI). I finally ended up performing a system recovery to get rid of the trash left behind. (Thank God for Windows system recovery! That has help me clear out more install problems than I can count! Side note: Be sure you increase the amount of space Windows allocates to storing prior versions of your system restore points, so you can go back to a last known good point. You may need to go back multiple installs if you end up installing and need to uninstall bad software, unneeded updates, etc.)After about 4 hours of beating my brains out, I got a good night's sleep and made another run at this. Installed the latest version of the Sapphire / ATI / Catalyst drivers, and everything seemed to install fine. Then, after about a 1/2 a day of use, I found that the Sapphire / ATI driver for this setup can't support multiple users. I get garbled displays when I swap from one user to another.Back to system recovery to remove the Sapphire / ATI / Catalyst drivers and let Windows 7 install its own 6800 generic drivers. Now I can swap from one user to another with no problem. I'm also getting better performance numbers in Windows 7 Experience Index using the Windows 7 generic drivers (if that means anything): 7.8 and 7.8 in the Windows Aero and Gaming graphics, versus 7.6 in Windows Aero and 7.8 in Gaming Graphics when using the Sapphire / ATI drivers.I put in a support ticket to Sapphire, but so far, no response.Geez. Why is this so difficult. Still, at this point, I'm hanging on to the card ... if that tells you anything.Good luck!