Date:
Monday , July 25, 2011
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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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?

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home . Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.

System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W.

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For this evaluation Windows 7 x64 SP1 will be used. We are using the latest drivers at the time of testing, Catalyst 11.6 WHQL, for the Sapphire HD 6950, and the Sapphire HD 6950 Overclocked. For the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti we are using ForceWare 275.50 Beta.

Below is the GPU-Z screenshot of the Sapphire HD 6950 after we installed the drivers.

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