Reach clocks or actually benchmark at those speeds?
I don't see them on hwbot.org and if the cards clocked that easy, that well and passed benchmarks, they would totally dominate all benchmarks.
That's exactly my point! I'm going nuts just to try and understand how they didn't completely conquered the entire benchmark world!
Had 6 HD5850's
4 reference and two sapphire (Blue PCB ones)
one of the sapphire's could run perfectly stable at 1GHZ on 1.16V core and the other 1.18V
while all the reference designs i had managed to achieve this only at 1.25-1.29V
Even at stock-voltage overclocking they were utter beasts. At the same base voltage all the HD5850 could reach 835Mhz core clock
The sapphire cards could reach 925Mhz and 935Mhz on their core (same voltage as reference)
Same story with the HD6970. look here:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...phire-radeon-hd-6970-2gb-dual-fan-review.html
This overclock is UN-machable. Every HD6970 ive ever tested wont reach those clocks even at the highest voltage possible VIA software control
All those years experimenting with sapphire's amazing PCBs made me a die-hard sapphire fan, they earned it.
When I saw the leaked details about an ATOMIC cards operating at 1335MHZ it blew my mind, becuase i knew they will create another amazing UniPCB for the HD7900 series so i could enjoy ground-breaking overclocking abilities on simple HD7950 designs. As for now ive tested three HD7950s, two reference PCB'd ones and XFX's BE, the all passed 40+% overclocking over reference speeds, with sapphire's PCB i wouldn't be surprised to see 60-70 figures.
Now, thing is that i have no experience overclocking those graphics cards on a sub-ambient cooling but i can guess they wont be as good as cards like MSI's lightning edition. So their big advantages will be seen by the air\water cooling users.
