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This really has been a pretty interesting review. This card has delivered amazing performance for the price and has done it while also remaining completely silent. In fact, our power supply fan could be heard over the noise that this card generated. That's pretty impressive since the card never reached 60 degrees Celsius either even under full load.
Most users will simply install this and enjoy the performance that it gives right out of the box. For those that won't be satisfied with just stock performance this card can be overclocked further with Sapphire's TriXX software. This software has a very nice interface that will give you all of the options that you want for enhancing the performance of your Sapphire GPU. With the aggressive cooling solution it should also be able to remain cool and silent while being pushed to its limits. These cards tend to be very sturdy and should be able to take some overclocking beyond what Sapphire was able to provide. Just keep in mind that pushing your card beyond the settings that it came with could void your warranty.
This card really does shine at delivering a really quiet solution that's still able to keep the card running nice and cool. With the large fans and heat sink, every part of the card is kept cool. This includes the PCB and the ram chips. With cool air passing directly over them there is no way for them to overheat. We also tested this card on an open-air test bench, so you will probably get even better performance from a case that has decent airflow. With a side panel fan this card shouldn't have any problem staying under 55 degrees Celsius as long as your ambient temperatures aren't too high. This is something that most people overlook. You really can't compare temperatures without taking into account the ambient temperature of the room that you're testing in. Our test room is kept at 23 C so that it's able to maintain the average temperature that most people are used to.
To wrap this up let me say that this card was a pleasure to work with. It handled all of our benchmarks without a problem and managed to do so while remaining completely silent. Sapphire really has developed quite an impressive cooling solution for these cards and it should also be able to take a little more of an overclock above what they've given it. Graphics cards are the real heart of a gaming system and these cards really do provide the performance that most users will be looking for. Right out of the box this card delivers amazing performance that is certain to give nVidia a run for their money. This is a great card for the red team to come out with and Sapphire has done a great job at making it even better than the reference version. There really aren't any games that this card won't be able to handle as long as you aren't expecting ridiculous frame rates. Playable frame rates at high resolutions are exactly what this card is able to provide. We know that it's just a matter of time before nVidia comes with their own answer to this card, but until then this is the new champ in terms of price versus performance. For this reason we have no problem giving this card our Editor's Choice Award here at Motherboards.Org.
