As we all know last Tuesday was the official release date for AMDs 7950 graphics cards. We’ve already taken a look at one of the offerings from XFX, but now its Sapphires turn to take centre stage and show us what they can do to spice up the reference design to their tastes.

The 7950 that Sapphire have sent us to tinker with is their Radeon HD 7950 Overclocked Edition. Fresh out of the Sapphire factories, we see this card launched with a 100Mhz overclock on the GPU core, giving it the right to display the OC label, but more crucially we see a remake of a heatpipe cooler design rather than a vapour chamber arrangement that is appearing more and more from other manufacturers.

With the 7950 OC coming to us at a slightly closer reference level when comparing to the XFX Black Edition Overclocked that we looked the other day, naturally we expect it to perform in a similar manner and being very close to reference point, which we can get a feel for what a more stock like card can do in rivalry to its bigger brother; the 7970.

Overclocking and processing performance aside, the basis behind this card is to do with the cooler and how it performs under load and more so when the end user takes it and overclocks it themselves to the next level. Its how it will perform then that matters. And that is what we are hoping to see as we go through our testing.

Evga were originally founded in 1999 and are focussed towards lots of different markets, including the system builder, distribution and of course, the retail sector. Whilst they have a lot of product ranges which including graphics, motherboards, displays, peripherals and much more, we want to focus more on the VGA side of their business today.

The graphics card market is taken up by two major brands, as we know. AMD and Nvidia are both rival competitors and both have their merits as well as their not so great points, but that’s for another article. AMD and Nvidia both produce the GPU core, whilst their partners produce the coolers and the rest of the technology based around it.

The cooler generally consists of various components that are built from the ground up to offer a silent and efficient solution to keeping the graphics card cool. We find a lot of manufacturers utilising a copper heat-pipe design with a large fan to exhaust the hot air out towards the rear of the card, whilst others are manufacturing cards with water cooling type designs. We’ve even see types of cards with both style coolers, which looks like some kind of science experiment gone wrong.

How the design of the card looks is entirely up to the partner, and we’ve seen some seriously hideous designs in the past, whilst others are simply beautiful. The only cards that look the same are the reference cards from AMD and Nvidia which simply have a branded sticker on them, but that’s all down to the GPU manufacturer’s and the way that they wanted things launched.

Now we’re not going to mention about the war between AMD and Nvidia, as we said, they both have their good and bad points, and that’s all down to personal opinion at the end of the day, and whilst some vendors such as Asus and Club3D cater for both AMD and Nvidia, others such as Evga focus on just one brand; Nvidia in this instance.

With lots of rumours about AMD and Nvidia releasing new cards in 2012, we find a lot of graphics card manufacturers clinching on to the life of the current cards and trying to spice things up to give a breath of fresh air to an already old card.

The 6970 isn’t exactly old, as it’s still very current, but with a fast paced industry like this one, technology is old before its even been released. This is down to the manufacturer’s starting the thought process on its sucessor already, even at the early stages, and that’s a good thing, as it keeps the tech fast moving and invites new things to be brought to the table.

To give a certain range of cards a slight edge, we see vendors giving it an overhaul in terms of cooling, or giving a slight bump to the clock speeds or even adding their own technology to the PCB, or sometimes even doing a combination which is what we’ve seen with the FleX series of cards from Sapphire.

FleX offers a custom Vapor-X cooler design, as well as incorporating their technology which offers a FleXible solution to multiple monitor configurations, especially with Eyefinity being the new hot way to game at the moment.

Today we’re looking at a 6970 FleX card with a difference, as it includes the fancy Vapor-X cooler, the FleX technology, but is overclocked too and even comes with Battlefield 3 to get you gaming in no time. You can’t really ask for much more, especially on a high-end card, much like this one.

We’re really interested to see how this limited edition card performs in our tests, as from the offset, it seems to offer the whole package.

Unless you really do have your ear to the ground, you may be unaware as to who VTX3D are. VTX3d or Vertex 3D are a brand that have been brought to the market by the TUL Corporation, which you may or may have not noticed from the uncanny styling that’s similar on both ranges of cards, is the parent company of leading graphics card manufacturer PowerColor.

VTX3D have been launched to offer the same products as PowerColor but with a slight difference, and that’s the price. They have been deemed to be the “price aggressive” department of TUL Corporation, which is great for the consumer as it passes the savings on but still remains to give you great performance and good quality, all at the same time.

One of the hottest selling cards around is the Radeon HD 6850 which offers one of the best price/performance ratios that we’ve ever seen in the history of AMD graphics cards. VTX3D have adopted this by creating their very own version; the X-Edition HD 6850. X-Edition is VTX3D’s way of showing what they can do with a 6850 being added to the mix against the big contenders such as Asus and Sapphire but with slightly overclocked speeds so it will be interesting to see how this value concious brand copes with our new and improved testing procedures for graphics cards.

The card certainly offers a unique looking design and seems to include all of the features that we’d expect from a Radeon HD 6850, and as it’s a new brand to us, we’re extremely keen to see how things go, so let’s get straight into it and see what makes this card tick.

What MSI hopes this will achieve is an expulsion of dust since changing the direction of the fans makes them expel air and dust not intake it. MSI is claiming you can get up to 15 degrees cooler temperatures on a clean video card cooler compared to a dusty one. We will have to wait and see what difference this actually makes since only upcoming cards will be equipped with it but it certainly seems like a good idea to avoid having to clean your video cards.

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The cards will be able to transmit and recieve wireless signals and data. In addition to this WPA, WEP and WPA2 security encryption too. The only catch is the camera’s or devices you buy must be “Toshiba FlashAir” certified as these cards apparently will not work with just any camera or device. Toshiba is planning the launch for North America, Europe and Japan.

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The latter has been produced in conjunction with Asetek, a leader in CPU thermal management, and will provide the gamers with easy out-of-the-box installation. The liquid cooling is in a close loop and will allow more overclocking headroom, as well as the quietness of fan speed reduction.

PNY’s new XLR8 solution presents significant benefits, with 30% reduction in GPU/CPU temperatures, 30% noise reduction and 10% faster performance than the standard card. The reduced fan noise is something avid gamers will like, as this will allow for better gaming, and the headsets to cover the noise won’t be required.

“Designed to increase performance while reducing noise and temperature, PNY’s Liquid Cooled Graphics offers the fastest factory-overclocked card currently on the market at 857 MHz,” said Nicholas Mauro, senior marketing manager, PC components for PNY. “The simple all-in-one design offers a powerful, yet easy to install and cost-effective gaming solution that’s backed by the PNY warranty. This highly anticipated graphics option will enable more enthusiast gamers to experience gaming in a whole new way.”

To promote their new release, PNY has a special offer to the first 100 consumers to purchase from PNY.com, as the buyer will receive a special promotional bundle with over $100 worth of bonus: a 16ft Active High Speed HDMI Mini to HDMI Cable, a custom-built PNY 8GB ‘Liquid Cooled’ USB Flash Drive, and a ‘Liquid Cooled’ logo T-shirt. Only the first 100 consumers, so if you’re interested, get going.

More in-depth specifications:

• 1536 MB of GDDR5 frame buffer memory
• 857 MHz core clock and 1714 MHz processor core clock
• 512 processor cores
• 202.18 GB/second memory bandwidth
• 384-bit memory interface
• A texture fill rate of 54.85 billion/second
• An effective memory data rate of 4212 MHz

The XLR8 Liquid Cooler GTX 580 is at a MSRP of $579.99 while the same but with the CPU Cooling comes at $649.99. Both have a 3 year warranty as a standard although if the product is registered at PNY.com within the 90 days of the purchase, this warranty is extended to 5 years. Also offered by PNY.com is a 24-hour technical support.

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• For the i3 2102 you will probably get a clock speed boost from 3.1GHz to 3.6GHz which essentially makes the i3 2102 and i3 2153 and results in a performance boost of about 11-15%.
• For the i3 2312M you will probably get an extra 1MB of L3 cache and a clock speed boost from 2.1GHz to 2.5GHz which essentially turns the i3 2312M into an i3 2393M and results in a performance boost of about 10-19%.
• For the Pentium G622 you will probably get a clock speed boost from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz which will give you around 15-23% more performance making your G622 a G693.

These cards are only based on well publicised speculation currently, the source of the current performance estimates is AnandTech but the speculation has been around for nearly a year now so we expect there is some integrity behind it. Early thoughts suggest the upgrade card will be a flat $50 cost for all three CPUs which seems a bit steep for the Pentium G622 since it costs only $65 initially. However, it has been pointed out for those with OEM built systems where upgrades void warranties these cards will prove a useful option.

The GTX 560Ti becomes the KFA2 GeForce GTX560TI MDT X5 graphics card, the MDT representing the fact it can support multiple monitors and the X5 showing that this monitor supports an impressive 5 screens. The GTX 560Ti does not natively support this many monitors, KFA2 have utilised a third party PCB controller the ViewXpand VMM1400/1402 chipset which allows the GTX 560Ti to support additional monitors. Users can create a single screen effect (i.e. Nvidia Surround or AMD Eyefinity) on only 4 screens or lower, if 5 screens are used they will all be separate. 4 displays can support an impressive resolution of 5760 by 900 and 3 displays can support 5040 by 1050.

The KFA2 210 MDT X4 is a more functional card not aimed towards the gamers since it lacks the power for gaming. This card even though relatively weak supports an impressive 4 monitors all at 1080p resolutions using the IDT VMM1402 third party controller. And provides an ideal multi display card for a much lower price point than most other cards.

Both of these new cards will be backed with a 2 year KFA2 warranty and will be shipped to European retailers very soon.

The fan is a 92mm arctic cooling fan with speeds from 900-2000RPM on a PWM controller, it can push up to 27CFM of air and makes 0.4 sone of noise which is around 25dBa. Included are the main heat sink, eight additional standard mosfet sized heat sinks, an assortment of screws and bolts and a sachet of G1 arctic cooling paste. Prices start at 17 euros or $22.

The cards can utilise Windows Media Centre to stream High Definition or Standard Definition TV to the computer without the need for a TV set up. The diagram below shows how the device actually functions, you can run a TV or a monitor off the card as the card is essentially the signal reciever:

The specifications of the cards are pretty standard, they utilise AMD reference clock speeds, you can see the full specifications of the two cards below:

This is definitely going to be a great buy for those who want to increase the functionality of their computers or just want to get rid of the aging TV.

The new products are going to be formed of the X580 Captain. X560 Series, X550Ti DF and the X520 series. As the names suggests the cards will be based on the GTX 580. GTX 560Ti, GTX 560, GTX 550Ti and GT 520 respectively.

The custom designed coolers are boasting up to 30% reduction in thermal temperatures compared to leading competitiors and an increase in performance of around 20% over stock models with additional capacity to overclock further. The X560 model of the GTX 560Ti comes standard clocked at a staggering 1GHz with additional overclocking performance in case you need to push it even further. The custom coolers also boast full load noise levels of 28 decibels and under.

Sparkle is yet to announce an official pricing list yet for this new range but except them to be a substantial amount more expensive than the reference versions of the cards they are based on, 20-30% more expensive would be a reasonable target.

The UltraCharged version ended up clocked at 810MHz for the core and 3960 MHz for memory. It features the same 480 CUDA cores but has 2,560 MB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 320-bit memory interface.

The Charged version was clocked at a mere in comparison, 772 MHz for the GPU and 3800 MHz for the same memory. Both cards also feature two DVI, HDMI and Displayport outputs.

POV/TGT also point out that these cards do still have additional overclocking headroom with this cooler, giving you plenty to brag about. Hopefully a price will be coming soon but we don’t expect it to be that cheap.

As another competition comes to a close, we have teamed up with another company to offer something back to our valued readers of eTeknix. If this is the first giveaway you are entering, to let you know we host a new giveaway EVERY week so be sure to keep up-to-date with eTeknix and what’s going on.

To kick start Giveaway #3 we are teaming up with leading graphics card manufacturer Sapphire to give two lucky people from Europe the chance to win a fantastic Sapphire HD 6870 FleX Edition 1GB graphics card worth £175 each.

Also as a further incentive, Sapphire are generously including a Dirt 3 coupon with each of the prizes!

All prizes are provided by Sapphire and more information on this card can be found directly on the Sapphire official website.

To be within a chance of winning these fantastic prizes from Sapphire and eTeknix, all you have to do is to complete the following:

• Become an eTeknix Facebook fan
• Post on your OWN Facebook profile as a status update say “I want to win the Sapphire HD 6870 FleX Edition 1GB Graphics Card at www.eTeknix.com“
• Become a Sapphire Facebook fan
• Comment below with a link to your Facebook profile so that we can verify the update.

Rules and regulations:

As always we have to have rules to protect winners and their chance of winning.

• The winner will be randomly selected by Sapphire.
• The competition is open to EUROPEAN RESIDENTS ONLY!
• Competition ends at midnight GMT on 3rd July 2011

The CoolIT OMNI A.L.C., winner of the 2010 CES Innovations Design & Engineering Showcase Award, is the world’s first universally designed self-contained liquid cooling system for graphics cards.

“We have no doubt that our OMNI N590 will be an extremely successful product for us and our system builder partners,” says Barry Fairhurst, Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Services. “Leveraging off our success with OMNI N480 and N580, OMNI N590 will continue to ensure our leadership position in liquid cooling for enthusiast graphic cards.”

Further backed by CoolIT’s expertise in custom development, the OMNI can be tailored to meet system integrator requirements so that their OMNI solution is as unique as the polished powerhouse PC’s they deliver to customers. Built to these exacting specifications and paired with NVIDIA’s fastest graphics card ever, the GeForce GTX 590, OMNI N590 can deliver up to 30°C lower GPU operating temperatures* while minimizing acoustics.

“We are excited about the OMNI N590 as it makes the world’s fastest graphics card, even better,” said Drew Henry, general manager of the GeForce business unit at NVIDIA. “PC enthusiasts now have the best components available to build out the fastest, quietest, and coolest gaming rigs ever imagined.”

The CoolIT OMNI N590 is immediately available from select premier system integrators including MAINGEAR, Falcon Northwest and Puget Systems as part of a complete system.
www.falcon-nw.com
www.maingear.com
www.pugetsystems.com

*Depending on configuration