14 DAY TRIAL // Even though quite a few months have passed since Codemaster has introduced Dirt3 to the world, this hasn't stopped Sapphire from releasing a new Radeon HD 6870 graphics card that comes bundled with a voucher code for the full version of the game.
Known as the HD 6870 1G GDDR5 Dirt3 Edition, Sapphire's latest creation is based on a custom design developed in house by Sapphire and its most distinctive feature is the dual-fan cooling solution employed for keeping the temperatures of the GPU in check.
According to Sapphire, this cooler increases both the thermal and acoustics performance of the card, as the two 90mm fans with thin impellers can move the same amount of air at 10% lower rotation speeds than conventional fans.
In addition to providing quieter and cooler operation, the new custom design also enabled Sapphire to raise the operating clocks of the HD 6870 Dirt3 Edition.
As a result, the Barts XT core is now clocked at 920MHz in comparison with the 900MHz employed by AMD's reference design, while the memory works at the same 1.05GHz (4.2GHz effective) frequency as before.
Like most other solutions based on the Radeon HD 6870 design, Sapphire's creation is equipped with two DVI, one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort connectors.
However, owners of older monitors with VGA inputs can still use this solution thanks to a supplied DVI-to-VGA dongle.
No information regarding the pricing or the released date of the Sapphire Dirt3 Special Edition graphics card was supplied by the manufacturer.
The Radeon HD 6870 is based on AMD's Barts XT core and it packs 1120 stream processors, 56 texturing units, 32 ROP units, and a 256-bit memory bus usually connected to 1GB of GDDR5 memory.
