Club3D Radeon HD 6950 Battlefield 3 Edition Graphics Card Review

The card itself is identical to the CoolStream Edition, which is because technically it is. The card has no Battlefield 3 branding of any form which is a real shame, as it would have given it a bit more flair, but the current design still looks professional and means business. There are two fans which are situated over an aluminium heatsink.

The CoolStream design features heatpipes towards the top of the card. This helps remove the heat from the GPU and to transfer it to the farthest parts of the card, towards the ends of the heatsink.

The cooler incorporates two fans which have a unique fan blade design due to the way they are mounted and the way the blades are angled. This allows for the best possible airflow across the card, whilst keeping noise to a minimum.

Moving along the top of the card to the end we find the power connectors. Power wise, the card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express connectors, as we’d expect on any 6950.

Moving along the top towards the rear of the card we find two CrossFireX connectors covered by a protective cap. By having two connectors, this card can be used in a Quad AMD CrossFireX solution for the most extreme gaming experience and raw power to your games. In typical 6950 style, a BIOS switch is also included, of which we’ve seen pre-loaded overclocked BIOS editions on, but sadly this card just has two stock BIOS editions, but allows you to overclock yourself in the hope of pushing your card further.

The rear of the card also had protective caps over every display output of which we find two DVI ports, HDMI and two mini DisplayPorts. Being a 6950 from AMD, we get the ability to utilise AMD Eyefinity, of which we will be using throughout our tests of games and gaming based benchmarks.

As we already said, the card has two BIOS editions, but the card runs at stock which includes a 800MHz GPU clock and 1250MHz memory clock (5GHz effective) on both BIOS versions, even though GPU-Z reports differently.