AMD Radeon 6950 1GB Graphics Card Review

AMD have been in the limelight a lot as of late, especially in regards to the Radeon 6990 dual GPU monster that we looked at a little while ago. If it wasn't for the 6950 and 6970 there wouldn't have been anything to base the beast off of, therefore we thought we'd pay homage to the Radeon 6950 by taking a look at the 1GB version.We took a look at the fully fledged HIS Radeon 6950 2GB card from HIS a little while ago which gave outstanding results, but AMD wanting to appeal to a mass market, decided to venture into the 1Gb territory with this Radeon 6950 1GB graphics card. With a slight performance hit, will the extra added value be something that people are looking for in a graphics card or is the 2Gb flavour still the one to go for?Specifications[HR][/HR] 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. An Even Closer LookThe 6950 features the standard black plastic casing that we've seen on many cards before and no hint at a change is evident. The fan is located towards the end and features the same style cooling as seen on the 2Gb variant. Once the card has been taken off, it reveals the same design as the other 6900 series cards and its big copper block and thermal pads can be seen. The ATi (who?) fan can be seen which forces air through the aluminium block and exhausts out of the back of the card where your expansion bays are situated. An exposed card sees a reference design with the GPU core taking centre stage surround by the memory chips. The back of the card features an array of screw points for the heatsink and bracket as well as the outer casing. Cards from AMD's partners may feature a different design depending on the cooler design. Even though the cooler features an ATi branded fan, the core shows off the patented AMD logo. The memory used are Hynix GDDR5 memory chips that we've seen on other cards from the 6900 series. The code on the chips are H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C and operate at 1250MHz (5000MHz). Test SetupAs with all our graphics card tests, we use a number of benchmarking utilities and programs to squeeze out every last frame possible from the card whilst placing it under immense pressure. We do this in our separate testing rig as detailed below which supports AMD and Nvidia cards to give the fairest tests possible.Test SystemProcessor (CPU)AMD Phenom II X6 1100TMotherboardAsus Crosshair IV FormulaMemory (RAM)4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1800MHz Graphics CardAMD Radeon HD 6950Heatsink (HSF)CoolerMaster Hyper 212+Primary Hard Drive2 x Kingston V+ Series 64GB SSD (RAID 0)Power SupplyBFG EX Series 1200 Watt Modular Power SupplyChassisCoolerMaster Lab Test BenchOperating SystemWindows 7 Professional Edition 64-bitThe tools that we use for benchmarking graphics cards include:3DMark 11Unigine Heaven 2.1Batman: Arkham AsylumDirt 2Just Cause 2Mafia IIMetro 2033 We also use other tools to monitor certain aspects of the graphics card, this includes:CPUID HWMonitorDigital MultiMeterMSI AfterburnerGPU-Z 3DMark 11 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. Unigine Heaven 2.1 Heaven 2.1 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. Batman: Arkham Asylum Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure stealth game that uses the Unreal Engine 3. It relies heavily on nVidia's PhsyX engine to give improved physics throughout if available. and uses lots of textures and polygons to build the characters and environments seen in the game. Dirt 2 The physics engine from within Dirt 2 is a good test of a card and it's rendering capabilities with fine details such as dust trailing from the rear of the car. There is also the aspect of light and reflections from the cars bodywork and the ability to work with the in game physics and damage rendering engines to produce a realistic gaming experience. Just Cause 2 Just Cause 2 is an open world action-adventure video game that was released at the beginning of 2010. The game uses the Avalanche Engine 2.0 and runs on DirectX 10. Several graphics effects and features are used to give a thorough workout to new and even older graphics cards. Mafia II Mafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games. Metro 2033 Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. Overclocking The 6950 features a BIOS switch enabling you to overclock one BIOS and even fry its brains out, and having the ability to switch back to its unaltered state. The stock speed of this card is 800MHz GPU clock with a 1250MHz memory clock. To find the maximum overclock, we used MSI Afterburner to increase the clock speeds by 10MHz at a time, whilst relying on GPU-Z for clarification of the speeds and Furmark to test stability.The results that we obtain can only be used as a guideline as to what this range of cards can do. Obviously every card has a different core among other vital parts, and therefore each card will give slightly varied results. The overclocks that we were able to obtain at full stability were 950MHz Core/GPU clock and 1438MHz memory clock which from the stock 800MHz were quite impressive giving a huge increase of 150MHz whilst the memory clock still had a reasonable increase of 180MHz.Final ThoughtsThe whole point in the 1Gb version is to offer a better deal for your money, and we can safely say that AMD have done exactly that as this card offers a better bang for buck, even when the 2Gb version isn't exactly terrible value for money. This is evident when looking at the benchmark results first hand as some tests showed a slight improvement with this card in comparison to its slightly beefier brother, whereas other tests showed the loss in frames from the missing 1Gb of memory. If you're on a budget and still want to gain fantastic performance, then this is the card for you and with overclocking headroom that can't be growled at, you'd be silly to not buy this card. Just remember, your particular card may give slightly different results to ours, but based off what we've seen, you should still have something worth smiling at whilst still having enough for a crate of beer in your back pocket. Pros:Good benchmark resultsDual BIOSFull DirectX 11 supportAMD EyefinityInexpensive Cons:Can be considered noisyWe would like to thank AMD for supplying this sampleYou can purchase this item from Scan Attached files 1.jpg (87.3 KB) 1.jpg (37.1 KB) 2.jpg (70.2 KB) 2.jpg (46.1 KB) 3.jpg (40.5 KB) 3.jpg (65.2 KB) 3dmark11.jpg (41.2 KB) 3dmark11.jpg (7.4 KB) 4.jpg (41.7 KB) 4.jpg (27.5 KB) 5.jpg (61 KB) 5.jpg (37.5 KB) 6.jpg (69.4 KB) 6.jpg (73.4 KB) 6950.jpg (33.8 KB) 6950OC.jpg (63.2 KB) 6950Stock.jpg (62.2 KB) 7.jpg (86 KB) 7.jpg (49.4 KB) 8.jpg (68.4 KB) batman-arkham-asylum.jpg (49.4 KB) batman.jpg (44.1 KB) dirt2.jpg (39.8 KB) gold.jpg (14 KB) heaven.jpg (49.3 KB) heaven.jpg (39.7 KB) just-cause-2.jpg (43.3 KB) justcause2.jpg (40.8 KB) mafia2.jpg (38.7 KB) metro-2033.jpg (56.4 KB) metro.jpg (41 KB) specs.jpg (52.7 KB)