The SAPPHIRE HD6970 BFBC2: Vietnam Special Edition will be competing with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 570 and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580. We overclock the SAPPHIRE HD6970 BFBC2:V Special Edition using SAPPHIRE TriXX Tweak Utility and voltage tweaking to see how it can compare to the more expensive GTX 580.

Sapphire Technology is a well-known company based in Hong Kong, and is recognized as the single largest supplier of AMD-based video cards in the world. Since ATI began funneling graphics processors to add-in-board partners in 2001, Sapphire has been at the head of the red-team pack. In addition to video cards, Sapphire also offers a series of motherboards, workstation class video cards, multimedia products such as TV tuners and Digital Photo frames, and mini PCs like the EDGE HD2.

On our test bench today is SAPPHIRE’s flashiest Radeon HD 6970 card, the SAPPHIRE HD6970 BFBC2: Vietnam Special Edition. In addition to our highest playable gameplay evaluation comparisons we will be adding extra testing of this video card using SAPPHIRE’s TriXX Tweak Utility and voltage modification against a reference GeForce GTX 580.

AMD launched the Radeon HD 6970 on December 14th, 2010, alongside the Radeon HD 6950. The Radeon HD 6900 series of GPUs sports AMD’s VLIW4 architecture, which is different from the 6800 series’ VLIW5 architecture. It features a greater degree of parallelism in its processing engine. VLIW4 was implemented in order to increase both efficiency and performance.

The Radeon HD 6970 is comprised of 2.64 billion transistors, providing 1536 streaming processors, 96 texture units, 32 color rasterizers, and 128 Z/Stencil ROPs. It boasts an impressive 2.7 TFLOPS of computer power on the GPU, texture fill rate of 84.5 Gigatexels per second, and a pixel fill rate of 28.2 Gigatexels per second. The HD 6970 has 2048MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1375MHz (or 5.5GHz DDR) on a 256-bit bus. Its memory bus boasts a maximum theoretical throughput of 176 Gbps.

• READ MORE (Source): HARDOCP – Introduction – SAPPHIRE HD6970 BFBC2: Vietnam Special Edition Review