Review (Sapphire) AMD Radeon HD 6670 1GB Graphics Card: No Power Plug Needed!

Author

Oik Yusuf Araya

Reading time:

Graphics Card

May 10, 2011

readmode

Graphics card

Now this is the graphics card itself. Sapphire uses a custom PCB design and a non-reference HSF from Arctic cooling for its Radeon HD 6670 product.

The Arctic Cooling HSF unit consists of an aluminum HSF topped off with a 9,2 cm fans. We noticed that the fan has 11 blades, which is quite a lot and should provide ample airflow to dissipate heat off the aluminum fins underneath it.
Let’s see if the Arctic Cooling HSF really means something. We used the Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmark to load up the graphics card and measure its temperature. Here are the readings:

Sapphire HD 6670

Full-load : 55 °C (fan speed 44 %).
Idle : 39 °C (fan speed 34 %).

The temperatures are quite good. Well within the safe limits.

Sapphire uses Hynix memory chips for this Radeon HD 6670 graphics card. Some of them are visible beneath the HSF.

Although we did not find any Crossfire connector on this card, you can still combine a pair of Radeon HD 6670s to form a multi-GPU setup. Yes, that’s right, you don’t need to use Crossfire connector to run the HD 6670 in Crossfire mode!

This is how the PCB layout looks like from the back. Unlike reference-based HD 6670s with their black PCB, Sapphire chose to go down the more colorful way by using blue circuit boards for its HD 6670 graphics cards.

As with all modern graphics card, Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 connects to the motherboard via a PCI-Express x16 2.1 interface slot. It’s also backward compatible with older PCI-E revisions.