HIS HD6970 & HD6950 Review

Under The Skin

With the cooler removed you’ll forgive us if we say it looks like almost any other graphics card you’ve ever seen. That isn’t a bad thing but demonstrates how “right” the design now is of a GPU surrounded by the GDDR5 with the power phases on the other end of the card.

      

The cooler has lots of room around the fan to help keep the power circuitry cool. We also have the normal thermal pads to keep the RAM cool but the GPU block itself deserves much closer inspection.

      

We don’t know if these reference designs are out-sourced to the same company or not but the chunk of aluminium on a copper base looks similar to that on the GTX570.

      

It’s a true vapour-chamber arrangement too. None of your empty heat-pipes here. This should definitely help keep the card cool. We can also see a close-up of the tiny twin-BIOS switch that should ease the concerns of anyone who hasn’t flashed the BIOS on their GPU before.