AMD Radeon 6950 1GB Graphics Card Review
Andy Ruffell / 14 years ago
A Closer Look
The card looks very similar to the Radeon 6950 2Gb graphics card but is slightly slimmer in terms of the width of the card whilst the length of the card remains the same which some may agree is quite on the large side.
The underneath of the card is nothing out of the ordinary and keeps in with the AMD red styling on the PCB. A clamp bracket is clearly visible which aids in mounting the heatsink on from this side.
As said, the width of the card is slightly slimmer but the card still takes up two expansion slots in your system and the difference is very little and hardly noticeable.
The card uses the standard PCI-Express 2.1 interface.
The power on this card remains the same as the 2GB flavour and requires two x 6-pin PCI-Express power adapters. These are both situated at the top of the card.
For users wanting more performance whilst remaining on a budget, you may decide to install a multi-GPU configuration. Whilst there are cards like the 6990 which features two GPUs on one card, the more favoured (and cheaper) option includes installing two of the same single GPU graphics cards in a CrossFire configuration. Whilst this doesn’t give double the performance, it will give you noticeably better results than having a single graphics card. As this card has two CrossFire adapters, it does allow you to install more than two cards together, but in our eyes, if you are looking at spending money on 3 or 4 of these cards, you may as well just get a 6990 instead.
You will also notice, next to the CrossFire ports is a small switch which enables the user to choose between two BIOS configurations. This is for users wanting to overclock and adjust speeds and voltages without the fear of frying the card. If the settings don’t take properly or a bad BIOS flash occurs, you can simply switch back to the non-altering BIOS instead which gives the end user piece of mind if nothing else.
Different cards include different connections and half of the time the end-partner such as Gigabyte or HIS decide on what connections to include. This card includes the same connections that we saw on the 6950 2GB from HIS a while back. These include two DVI connectors, a HDMI connector and two Mini-DisplayPorts which are becoming ever so more popular as companies such as Sapphire bring their set of Mini-Display port dongles to the mass market.
