AMD Radeon HD 6970 review

There’s 2GB of GDDR5 fitted, the most amount of memory we’ve ever seen on a single-core graphics card. It’s running at a swift 1,375MHz, and the card uses a 256-bit memory bus – so no bottlenecks here.

The HD 6970’s core runs at 880MHz, the fastest core speed the company has ever used. Or at least it does the vast majority of the time. AMD’s new PowerTune technology allows the company to reign in the ever-escalating power demands of graphics cards without impacting on day-to-day performance. Sensors in the card measure power draw at every clock cycle, and dynamically scale the core speed to keep it within the 250W TDP. This allows for a high base core speed, which is then throttled only under extreme cases – such as testing utilities that are designed to hammer the hardware. We never saw the clock scale back on our test samples during our various tests. You can adjust the degree to which PowerTune curbs performance in the Catalyst Control Centre, allowing users to increase the cards maximum TDP if they feel it necessary.

All that power is drawn through two connectors, one 8-pin and one 6-pin. Make sure your power supply has the necessary connectors and can handle the 250W draw before buying. The card itself is slightly larger than the 6800 series models, measuring 275mm in length, but it should still fit fine in most PC cases. There are the usual PCI-Express and CrossFire connectors, but what’s new is the small switch by the latter. This gives you access to dual BIOS, so you can make updates to the card without risking the original settings.

Display outputs haven’t changed from the 6800 series. There’s still two DVI connectors, only one of which can handle Dual-Link for display resolutions over 1,920×1,080 at 60Hz. A single HDMI 1.4a port provides full support for 3D viewing, along with output of HD audio from Blu-ray movies, such as DTS Master Audio. Finally, there’s a pair of mini DisplayPort 1.2 outputs, which enable numerous multi-monitor setups using AMD’s Eyefinity technology.