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AMD Radeon HD 6950 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £220
inc VAT

A powerful card for a very reasonable price, the HD 6950 is a great choice for any keen gamer.

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.

AMD Radeon HD 6950 ports

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.

AMD Radeon HD 6950 power

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.

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Basic Specifications

Price £220
Rating *****
Details www.amd.com
Award Best Buy
Interface PCI Express x16 2.1
Crossfire/SLI CrossFire
Slots taken up 2
Brand AMD
Graphics Processor AMD Radeon HD 6950
Memory 2GB GDDR5
Memory interface 256-bit
GPU clock speed 800MHz
Memory speed 1.25GHz
Card length 275mm

Features

Architecture 1,408 stream processors
Anti aliasing 24x
Anisotropic filtering 16x

Connectors

DVI outputs 2
VGA outputs 0
S-video output no
S-Video input no
Composite outputs no
Composite inputs no
Component outputs no
HDMI outputs 1
Power leads required 2x 6-pin PCI Express

Extras

Accessories N/A
Software included none

Benchmark Results

3DMark Vantage 1680 N/A
Call of Duty 4 1680 4xAA 88.9fps
Call of Duty 4 1440 4xAA 88.9fps
Crysis 1680 High 4xAA 66.2fps
Crysis 1440 High 4xAA 78.9fps

Buying Information

Warranty one-year RTB
Price £220
Supplier http://www.overclockers.co.uk
Details www.amd.com

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