Sapphire Radeon HD6670 Review

gotdamojo06 - April 25, 2011
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Testing:

Testing of the Sapphire HD6670 will consist of running it and comparison cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where they fall on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea of how the cards perform relative to each other.

The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing, other than applying the AA and AF settings manually in the control panel. I will test the cards at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see the effects of any increases in clock speed. The cards are placed in order from highest to lowest performing in the graphs to show where the cards fall by comparison.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card: Sapphire HD 6670
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: Cooler Master HAF 932

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Sapphire HD6670 890MHz | 1180MHz

Overclocking the Sapphire HD6670 was quite easy and routine, as is all graphics card overclocking, especially when you are unable to fine tune your overclock with voltage adjustments. To properly overclock and ensure I was able to get the highest stable clocks, I started off by adjusting the GPU by 20MHz at a time, testing the stability of the card by running a few loops of Crysis Warhead followed by a few loops of 3DMark11. If the tests passed, I would increase by 20MHz more until it was unstable then lowered by 10MHz until it was stable again. The final GPU core clock I was able to get to was 890MHz, which ends up being about an 11% increase. The memory overclocking was done using the exact same procedures. I was able to arrive at about an 18% increase, which was 1180MHz. To make all of these adjustments, I was using the Sapphire TriXX overclocking utility.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

In the past, I had used MSI's Kombuster utility to check for stability coupled with the ability to run through the entire test suite. I have found that some game tests would still fail with this utility, so I have moved to testing with several games at maximum settings through several resolutions to verify the clock speeds that are listed below. Why the change? I have found some cards will play fine at a 4xAA setting, but fail when using 8xAA due to the increased graphics load. If it fails, then the clock speeds and tests are rerun until they pass.