Sapphire HD 7950 FleX Review - PAGE 1

AMD's Eyefinity continues to be the leading technology for driving multiple displays in the desktop market, yet while the technology has been available through three generations of graphics cards it still has some limitations. Mainly at least one DisplayPort monitor must be used in order to set up Eyefintiy, and monitors using this connection standard are still few and far between. To address this Sapphire created the FleX series of graphics cards which comes with two on-board DVI connectors and an included HDMI to DVI adapter that allows a third DVI monitor to be connected to them. This approach not only makes connecting up to three displays to one card easier, but since no additional adapters or DisplayPort monitors are needed it is actually a more cost effective solution to boot.

Along with the enhanced Eyefinity support, the Sapphire HD 7950 FleX reviewed today also comes with an overclocked core and a larger Dual-X thermal solution. Both of these features will lead to a performance increase over the reference models as the Flex has a core clock speed of 860MHz instead of 800MHz, and the dual fan solution will dramatically increase the thermal efficiently while reducing the noise output. The memory however sports the reference clocks, but seeing how the FleX boasts a 3GB memory buffer running on a 384-bit memory interface we wouldn’t say this card is lacking in that department.

As with most custom graphics cards the Sapphire HD 7950 FleX does command a slight pricing premium over the reference models. Of course it will be in line with other custom boards from varying manufacturers, but at $419 it has an MSRP roughly 8% higher than the base models, putting it at the upper end of the HD 7950 pricing scale.