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Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex Video Card Review
Author: Will West
Published: Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Card Uncovered
Sapphire only uses a total of 4 screws to attach the heatsink onto the video card and made removal extremely easy. Under the heatsink we can see that it is only making contact with the GPU leaving the memory chips completely uncovered. Despite this it is nice to see a small black heatsink over the voltage regulators.
The heatsink uses a copper base plate for contacting the GPU and three 8mm heatpipes to move the heat away from the chip. The large fan in the middle of the heatsink pushes air through the shroud to cool the aluminum radiator. This cooling system is very effective at keeping good overall temperatures with very little noise.
Here we have the Radeon HD 6870 40nm chip with a good amount of thermal grease available on the chip. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex uses a total of 8 x 128MB GDDR5 chips for its onboard memory.
Sapphire uses high quality Solid Caps and Black Diamond Choke for the best in quality and extended lifespan. The better components also help when overclocking the card as well.
The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Flex takes a total of two PCI Express power connectors and a recommended 500 Watt PSU for proper usage of the video card.
