Sapphire Seeing Double with Dual-Fan, Dual-BIOS HD 6970 Videocard

Posted 11/01/2011 at 8:16am | by Paul Lilly

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The only thing missing from Sapphire's new Radeon HD 6970 2GB graphics card is a pack of DoubleMint gum. Otherwise, this card is all about doubling up what it has to offer (outside of the GPU), including a "super efficient" dual-fan cooler with two 90mm fans, and a dual-BIOS design that lets users choose between fast and quiet or really fast and not so quiet to allow for overclocking.

Sapphire's new HD 6970 2GB card is the same internally as the standard model, with 1536 stream processors, 96 texture units, 880MHz core clockspeed, and 1375MHz memory clockspeed. But as far as cooling goes, the dual-fan solution utilizes thin impellers that Sapphire claims can move the same amount of air at 10 percent lower rotation speeds than conventional fans

With regards to the switchable BIOS, setting it to Peformance mode jacks up the core voltage of the GPU to 1.2V and sets the fan speed to a high performance profile. In addition, the PowerTune adjustment for overclocking is raised to 50 percent, increasing clockspeeds to a ceiling of 1500MHz for the core and 2000MHz for the memory, Sapphire says.

No word yet on price or availability. As a point of reference, Sapphire's standard HD 6970 streets for around $350 (or around $320 with mail-in-rebate offers).

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Image Credit: Sapphire