Sapphire Intros Dirt 3 Special Edition Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6870 GPUs

Now that the third iteration of the popular Dirt rally game has been officially launched, Sapphire has announced the introduction of two new Special Edition graphics cards based on the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6870 designs that come bundled together with Codemaster's latest title.

The HD 6950 Dirt3 Special Edition is the more powerful of the two cards launched today by Sapphire and this is based on a custom design that comes with an improved cooling system.

This uses an aluminum heatsink that spans most of the PCB and the heat is drawn away from the AMD Cayman Pro GPU via a set of five 8mm thick heatpipes.

The whole cooling assembly is topped by a plastic shroud, which uses two high airflow fans in order to dissipate the heat produced by the card while running.

In addition to the improved cooling system, Sapphire has also tweaked the layout of the card a bit, to allow for the installation of a second BIOS chips.

Otherwise, the HD 6950 Dirt3 Special Edition closely follows AMD's specifications for the Cayman Pro core and has a GPU clock speed of 800MHz, while the 2GB of GDDR5 memory work at 1250Mhz (5GHz effective).

The second Dirt 3 Special Edition Sapphire card to be released today is based on the HD 6870 design and comes as a FleX model, meaning that it can support three DVI monitors in Eyefinity mode.

Usually, AMD Eyefinity graphics cards require the third display to be connected via a DisplayPort output, but Sapphire allows its users to install the monitor to the HDMI port by using the HDMI to DVI cable supplied together with the card.

Just like its older brother, the HD 6870 FleX Dirt3 SE also runs at the AMD stock clocks (900MHz core and 1050MHz memory), and packs a non-reference cooling system with three 8mm heatpipes and sealed dust resisting fan bearings.

Both Dirt 3 Special Edition graphics cards are bundled together with a coupon to download the full version of the game. The same game coupon will also be bundled with a number of other Sapphire cards in the HD 6000 series during Dirt 3's launch period.