Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition 2GB Video Card Review

System Overview & Testing Procedures
We will be installing the Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition 2GB Video Card in our Intel P67 system, which is comprised of the following components.

Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD55
Memory: Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 DDR3-1866 8GB
Video: Radeon HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition 2GB Video Card
Storage: 750GB SATA Drive
Power: Zalman ZM1000-HP Plus 1000W
Case: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Cooling: Thermaltake FRIO

We will be comparing the Radeon HD 6950 Dirt 3 Edition 2GB Video Card some of the recent video cards we have tested.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850
Sapphire Radeon HD 6950
Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti AMP! Edition

Opening up GPU-Z we can see all of the information on the card. It has a 800MHz core clock with the 2GB of memory running at 1250MHz. There are 1408 unified shaders and 32 ROPs, the card also supports DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 5.0.

info

We will be running 2 different types of tests on the card. The first are benchmarking programs, most of which you should be familiar with. The second part of the testing is actual game testing. The programs and games we are using are listed below as well as links where you can download or purchase them.

Video Tests
3DMark 11 (download)
3DMark Vantage (download)
Heaven Demo 2.5 (download)
Stone Giant Demo (download)

Game Tests
Alien vs. Predator (Buy)
DiRT 2 (Buy)
DiRT 3 (Buy)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat (Buy)

Now on to testing!

About Author