Sapphire HD 6670 Low Profile Review

RHKCommander959 - December 22, 2011
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Testing:

The testing consists of running Aliens vs. Predator, Metro 2033, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Lost Planet 2, Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.5, Just Cause 2, Mafia II, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, 3DMark 11 Professional, and temperature/power consumption testing. Two common resolutions are used for all the tests with medium settings and minimal AA and AF settings, but the 3DMark benchmark has three resolutions/runs. After a run through all the tests, the card is overclocked to roughly its maximum stable capabilities and then tested again. Settings stay the same for each card tested so the results can be compared. All testing is done on similar hardware running Windows 7 64-bit. The charts are all organized in terms of best to worst performance.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
Memory: Mushkin 998990 12GB 9-10-9-28 1866MHz
Video Card: Sapphire HD 6670 LP
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Corsair Graphite Series 600T

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Sapphire HD 6670 LP 860/1150

Most low profile cards will not overclock very well. The heat sinks are more compact than a full-sized card, there is less room on the PCB for better components and power phases, and so on. Without voltage control, I was able to push the core easily up to 865 MHz and the memory to 1150 MHz. The memory was unstable at 1160 MHz and would result in crashing, but the core may have had more wiggle room. The temperatures and fan noise levels were great throughout all the testing and really surprised me for the card having such a small heat sink. An 8% core and 15% memory is decent, though there may be room for improvement with thermal pads on the memory and some volt mods for more extreme overclockers! At 865/1150, the card operated perfectly stable throughout all the testing. The blower motor at 100% was audible, but not even as loud as the one on a 6970 at half speed.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consists of looping Crysis Warhead and Unigine 2.5 for 30 minutes each to see where the clock speeds will fail when pushed. If the clock speed adjustment fails, then the clock speeds and tests are re-run until they pass the full one hour of testing.