Sapphire has announced a FleX edition of the Radeon HD 7870 graphics card. It's the second card from AMD's Radeon HD 7000 series to receive the treatment, as Sapphire announced an HD 7950 FleX card a month ago. The FleX graphics cards feature an integrated active DisplayPort conversion chip, meaning they can power up to three monitors through DVI or HDMI. Normally, at least one of the monitors has to be attached to a DisplayPort connector to use the EyeFinity technology.
When they were first introduced, these FleX cards were quite an interesting solution, as external active DisplayPort adaptors were still relatively expensive. Since then, these adaptors have become much more affordable, which caused Sapphire's FleX series to be little more than a means of decreasing the amount of cables. The new Radeon HD 78707 FleX has two DVI outputs, an HDMI 1.4a connector and a full-sized DisplayPort 1.2 connector. The third monitor for EyeFinity can be attached to either the HDMI or the DisplayPort connector. It is also possible to use all four video outputs, powering up to four monitors simultaneously.
Apart from the integrated DisplayPort adaptor, Sapphire's card also uses an improved Dual-X cooler. This cooler consists of several thick copper heatpipes, an aluminium heatsink and two fans. This should allow the user to get some additional performance from the card, which has a 1 GHz core clock frequency. The 2 GB of GDDR5 memory has an effective speed of 4800 MHz. Sapphire has included a double BIOS, a welcome addition when overclocking. The card can be overclocked through the bundled TriXX software, which also allows users to adjust voltages and provides temperature data.
The new graphics cards has all the features that are characteristic of the HD 7000 series, including DirectX 11.1, an advanced video decoder, the ability to provide a separate audio signal per DisplayPort output, Fast HDMI 1.4a for the latest 3D televisions, APP acceleration and DirectCompute 11. The card can also be linked to a second HD 7870 by means of CrossFire.
Sapphire has yet to reveal any information regarding price and availability.
Sapphire announces Radeon HD 7870 FleX (image source: Techpowerup)
