HIS Radeon 6950 2GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look
The card itself quite surprisingly is longer than the GTX 580 from Nvidia which leaves us with hope that this card is going to be extremely good performance wise, at least if we’re going by the bigger is better scenario. Due to this some people may have problems fitting this card into their case. As with most graphics cards on the market today, this card will require two expansion slots in your case but that’s nothing out of the ordinary.

The styling on this card seems to follow a reference design with a bit of flair by having the HIS colour scheme, Excalibur, model name and branded HIS fan at the far right of the card.

The underneath of the card is a bit different to what we’ve seen in the past, where as generally we have seen the PCB, the card is now fully enclosed in plastic with a view of the GPU heatsink clamp and plenty of screws to show where the plastic cover mounts on from this side.

The fan design is something that we seen in the past with HIS, with a branded logo and open fin design which in turn will help push the heat towards the back of the card and eventually dissipate from the expansion slot which is designed to exhaust heat out of the back of your case.

Other than the fan, the graphics card as a whole is very encased with the plastic cover surrounding the card from front to back and from top to bottom.

Being the latest graphics card from AMD it has the latest PCI Express 2.1 bus interface which is of course backwards compatible with earlier PCI express interfaces.

For the user wanting to get the most performance for their money you may find that later on you will want to set up a multi-graphics card configuration using CrossFire. Unlike the 6800 series cards (which only support single CrossFire) this card supports two-way, three-way, and four-way CrossFire configurations as you can see from the two bridge ports.

Just next to the CrossFire bridge ports you will notice a new feature which there has been a lot of speculation about on the Internet as of late as to what it could be. Guesses included a turbo switch, voltage regulator, and even fan speed controller but this switch is for jumping from one BIOS to another. The graphics card will store two sets of BIOS instructions of which one can be updated and changed whilst the original will remain. To the average user this may seem redundant feature but to reviewers and computer enthusiasts, this is something that we’ve been wanting for quite some time.

Due to this card being fairly large, you half expect it to live by the “bigger is better” rule and therefore use mass amounts of power but only a 500W power supply is needed and unlike the GTX 580 this card only requires 2 6-pin PCI express power connectors.

Connection wise, we see nothing out of the ordinary with the expected 2 DVI ports, single HDMI and two mini Display Ports allowing up to 6 monitors in total using a mini Display Port hub and AMD’s EyeFinity configuration settings.