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.