AMD Radeon HD 6950 review

The new AMD Radeon HD 6970 may be the flagship card in the range, but in our experience, smaller graphics cards are just as worthy of your consideration. In this case we have the HD 6950, which sits just behind AMD’s new behemoth, providing most of the performance for a chunk less cash.

The HD 6950 is fairly close to the HD 6970 in terms of specification, with three key differences. First, the clock speed has been dropped from 880MHz to 800MHz, a significant change but not as big as we might have feared. Second is a reduction in the total number of stream processors, from 1,536 down to 1,408. Finally, memory speed has been reduced from 1,375MHz down to 1,250MHz. Other than that, the HD 6950 is firing on all cyclinders. It too has 2GB of GDDR5 memory and 256-bit memory bus.

For a full breakdown of the new architecture and its innovations, please see our HD 6970 review.

The reductions mean the card is slightly more power efficient. It has a TDP of 200W, and is fed by two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This card also uses AMD’s new PowerTune technology; although, as with the HD 6970, we didn’t see this kick in and throttle the core clock speed in our testing. It’s the same size as the more powerful card too, at 275mm long, and it ran fairly quiet and cool during our testing.

Its scores in our benchmarks were surprising similar to those of the more powerful card. Testing at a Full HD resolution with 4x anti-aliasing and High details, it scored 59.6fps in our Crysis test, compared to 65.2fps from the HD 6970, and an almost identical 60.4fps from the competing Nvidia GeForce GTX 570.

In our DirectX 11 Stalker test, the HD 6950 scored just ahead of the GTX 570, with 49.8fps compared to 47.5fps (for comparison the HD 6970 scored 56.3fps). However, in the newly released 3DMark 11 – run at our own custom settings of Performance preset, 1,920 x 1,080, 4X anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering – the situations were reversed, with the GTX 570 scoring slightly ahead.

The HD 6950 card is a step down from the HD 6970, but it’s only a small one, and you’ll rarely notice the difference between them when playing, making the more-powerful card’s £70 premium a little too steep. In terms of performance there’s practically nothing to divide this card from the GTX 570. At launch, though, the HD 6950 is at around £40 cheaper than its competitor. Finally, it’s only £40 more than the Radeon HD 6870, which it outclasses in most tests by more than 10fps. That makes the HD 6950 the powerful graphics card to buy.

For the purposes of this review, we were supplied with prices by card manufacturer HIS from www.overclockers.co.uk. Prices are likely to be volatile, however, with availability potentially pushing prices higher. If you’re keen then we’d recommend getting in quick.