Powercolor HD6970 Crossfire Review

Powercolor HD6970 Crossfire Review

Introduction

On Wednesday we looked at the latest in the AMD line-up of graphics cards and there seems to have been a little confusion about how we felt they performed. Certainly they didn’t perform as well as we expected, but that doesn’t mean that they performed badly at all.

It’s the down-side of Radeon cards being so good in recent years that expectations have been raised to such levels that a card giving 23000 P-Score in 3D Mark Vantage can be considered disappointing. A large part of our disappointment came from the excellent GTX570 performance and the reality that we can’t review things as if they exist in a vacuum. Undoubtedly the HD6970 is a great card, but when you look at the marketplace as a whole it is, as we said a couple of days ago, perfectly fine.

One thing all cards have shown in recent times though is that when paired up the performance is quite incredible. Improvements in motherboard bandwidth and driver optimisations have led to the old 50 percent performance being somewhat old-fashioned and the scaling has improved vastly.

With that in mind we just had to pair a couple of these latest AMD cards together to see how they perform and thanks to our friends at PowerColor we were able to do so a lot sooner than we thought we might be able to.

The real thing we are looking forward to is that these should form the basis of the upcoming HD6990 twin-GPU card so it enables us to not only get a glimpse of the now, but a small taster of the future.

Technical Specifications

As this is a reference design card the technical specifications are identical to those we saw previously. 880MHz core speed and 2GB of GDDR5 ensure that the card has plenty of grunt to handle anything you can throw at it.

Graphics Engine RADEON HD6970
Video Memory 2GB GDDR5
Engine Clock 880MHz
Memory Clock 1375MHz (5.5Gbps)
Memory Interface 256bit
DirectX® Support 11
Bus Standard PCIE 2.1
Standard Display Connectors DL-DVI-I/SL-DVI-D/HDMI/2* mini DisplayPort
OpenGL Support
CrossFireXâ„¢ Technology Support
ATI Stream Technology Support
ATI Eyefinity Technology Support
VGA Output Via Adapter
DVI Output DL-DVI-I/ SL-DVI-D
DisplayPort On Board
HDMI On Board

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