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Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 DiRT3 Edition Graphics Card Evaluation


Nemo

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Good review.

 

This is actually sold in my neck of the woods for the glorious price of €247.56. :-/

 

But I can get 2 of MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II 1GD5 GTX550-Ti 1GB GDDR5 192bit PCI-E for €270.00 for some SLI goodness.

 

Why doesn't NEWEGG ship to International addresses :cry:

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You guys should use Starcraft 2 for some benchmarks. I know it's not the easiest game to do (it doesn't have a specific benchmarking setup, I don't think), but it's one of the most popular games, and it has some skewed results sometimes. (HD6850 outperfoming GTX 460 1GB most of the time)

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but it's one of the most popular games, and it has some skewed results sometimes. (HD6850 outperfoming GTX 460 1GB most of the time)

 

Which is why we don't use it. It was all over the map. No consistancy even when it came to using the same card during testing. We don't have time too fight with games.

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Which is why we don't use it. It was all over the map. No consistancy even when it came to using the same card during testing. We don't have time too fight with games.

I understand that, but that's the unfortunate way that every review website feels (with the exception of Anandtech and Toms Hardware... sometimes). I do a lot of system planning on another forum, and a lot of the time it's stuff like "I need a $500 build that will run Starcraft 2 well." I don't know whether to go with a Core i5 2300 and a lower end GPU, or an i3 2100 and a higher end GPU. And once I decide on that, I have to try and find benchmarks, because it's hard to know which GPU to pick.

 

 

I'd suggest something like getting a replay that seems to be pretty hard on components (with a lot of units/a lot going on), and use that as a "Benchmark" replay or something.

 

 

Just some input :)

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I'd suggest something like getting a replay that seems to be pretty hard on components (with a lot of units/a lot going on), and use that as a "Benchmark" replay or something.

 

You missed what I said or I didn't explain it enough.

 

The problem with SC2 is its inconsistant. We had problems with framerates being repeatable running the same test over and over again. As soon as we have games like that we drop them. Between both camps adjusting drivers and the game going up and down it makes no sense.

 

As I said we don't have time too fight with games like that I don't care how popular the game is. The game is getting better, but its still got some bugs by the time those are fixed we will have moved on to way more powerful games.

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that is one of the MOST important things I look at when it comes to reviews. Consistency

 

Especially for anything Hardware related. I would rather see a weaker more consistently repeatable game used it testing than a game with un-repeatable results. If by some weird chance the results are skewed and the weaker card gets the better results people start spewing that result as gospel and claiming the weaker card is better and before you know it it spreads like wild fire and you have thousands if not millions of un-informed readers. Those kind of results just dont look good for a forums held in such high regards as OCC...

 

I for one, as well as others, am glad they hold such strict standards to their benchmarking scheme..... :)

 

Nice review as always.

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SC2 is heavily reliant on your CPU and RAM, thus why it is not a very good GPU-benchmarking tool. There are a lot of calculations that have to be done in an RTS like that.

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It's amazing to think that for 250$ you can have a top of the line video card that will run pretty much anything. I remember back in the day where just to run the latest games you would need to spend $5,000+!!! Things have really cheapened now haven't they? Most since such fast hard ware is becoming a lot more mainstream, and I think 10 years from now I'll probably be saying the same thing, when you can buy a beast card for 150$ and Crysis 5 will be around the corner.

 

Wow that was really off-topic, anyways nice review!

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  • 3 months later...

OCC reviewer gotdamojo06 has just completed a review of the Sapphire HD6950 2GB DiRT3 Edition - http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sapphire_hd6950/

I bought this card with the intention of setting up a multi-display for MS Flight Simulator X. The intention was to use 4 monitors, 3 to be used as an extended view and the 4th for the flight instruments. However it turned out the Dirt3 edition has one major difference wit the flex edition: it has only 1 Display Port and therefore does not support the config we wanted (this was conformed by Sapphiretech). So I'll have to exchange the card for the fex edition and if I want Dirt3 I'll have to purchase it separately... :(

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