Product on Review: HIS Radeon HD6950 2048MB
Manufacturer and Sponsor: HIS
MSRP: £223
Street Price: £219.98 @ Overclockers UK Price at time of review

The release of AMD's new line-up of graphics cards has to be one of the most hyped up technological release this year, especially amongst gamers and enthusiasts alike. And there is good reason for this, the HD58XX series proved to be a success right from its release over a year ago. Inevitably, our expectations have grown. Can AMD deliver round of high performance graphics card at competitive prices? Two months ago, we were greeted with AMD's Barts architecture. Naming scheme aside, the HD6850 and HD6870 proved to be excellent mid range graphics cards, performing nearly on par with the previous flagship HD5870 and yet being priced much lower. The release prompted a series of event that cascaded down to benefit consumers the most. On the one hand, we had AMD producing highly efficient, low power GPUs with tremendous overclocking headroom to satisfy enthusiasts and on the other hand we saw Nvidia responding with reduced pricing on the high end GF100 based GTX470 and mid range GF104 based GTX460. If that wasn't enough, Nvidia promptly took released more efficient GF110 based GPUs derived from the power hungry GF100 cores in the form of the GTX570 and GTX580. Inherently, the high end market has now become saturated with choice but for the consumers it has translated to cheaper high end solutions.

AMD are taking their revised architecture further with the release of the HD6970 and HD6950. The former will be their flagship single GPU solution and targets Nvidia's GTX570 whilst the HD6950 is priced in a class of its own. The Cayman architecture brings a number of benefits in the form of more efficient graphics through their refined VLIW4 architecture, 96 texture units and upgraded render back for improved anti-aliasing performance. What it also means is that the two cards will provide improvements in performance per die size. It should therefore come as no surprise that the HD6970 and HD6950 will sport 1536 and 1408 stream processors respectively to maintain increased performance in a smaller package. Much higher memory bandwidth is also promised, exceeding clock speeds offered previously on the Cypress based GPUs. Many of the features first introduced on the Barts architecture will also be carried forward such as Morphological AA and enhanced tessellation performance. AMD's HD6950, which we will be looking at today, promises to be a good card worthy of replacing the old stallion that was the HD5870.


The card we have received from HIS is the less expensive of the two Cayman based graphics card, the HD6950. The HD6950 boasts 1408 stream processors, 128 less than its bigger brother, clock speeds of 800/5000MHz and 88 texture units, all within a 200W TDP. HIS's offering follows the reference AMD design but as history will tell us, the AMD reference designs are usually the most sought after options.




Let's see what more AMD has in store for us...