Diamond, Sapphire & XFX AMD Radeon HD 6870 Video Card Roundup

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870

Sapphire also sent over a Radeon HD 6870 video card, but this time around it came with AMD reference clock frequencies of 900MHz on the core and 1050MHz on the GDDR5 memory ICs. This card is available under part number 100314SR and it currently sells for $239.99 plus $7.87 shipping on Newegg.com. The retail box looks great, but it mentions on a sticker that the TRiXX overclocking utility is included. The software is not included and, to be honest, it’s been nearly two weeks since the card has been launched and the software has yet to be made public for reasons unknown to us. We contacted Sapphire and they said that the software will be out soon. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 also includes a two year limited warranty, according to the retail box.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 is based once again off the AMD dual-slot reference design and other than a sticker change it looks just like the other Radeon HD 6870’s that we are reviewing here today.

The back of the Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 is the same as the cards by Diamond Multimedia and XFX since the PCB design is identical.

Sapphire left the display connections alone and went with the AMD designed exhaust plate and overall color scheme.

The Diamond Multimedia bundle on the previous page was rather sparse, so we didn’t have high hopes when we opened up the bundle box that was included in the retail packaging. We were impressed to see what we consider one of the best bundles that we have seen yet for a Radeon HD 6870 video card. Sapphire included a CrossFire interconnect or bridge for multi-GPU users, a quick installation guide, drivers CD, case badge sticker, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, an HDMI 1.4a cable that is 1.8 meters long, Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter, and two 4-pin molex to 6-pin PCI Express adapters for easy power connection. This is a very impressive bundle and has everything needed to get the Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 running smoothly after you purchase the card.

We took a peek at the software disk that comes in the Sapphire bundle and found it to include AMD Catalyst 10.10 drivers and that was it. When we clicked on the ‘Acrobat Reader’ or ‘Online Users Manual’ our web browser would open and take us to destination pages that Sapphire setup.

When we clicked on the ‘ATI Easy Install’ tab we found Windows only drivers; sorry, Linux users!