HIS Radeon HD 6970 MIX 2GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer LookThe card is fairly large and has a bulky cooler which resembles the style of cooler than HIS used on their older 4000 series cards back in the day. The Cooler is very oddly shaped and is translucent so that you can see the heatsink below.

Even though the cooler is quite large, as it takes up the whole of the card, it is still fairly low profile and doesn’t extend past the two expansion slots.

The top of the card brands the IceQ logo and has four copper heatpipes.

The heatpipes are divided up so that they all pass through the centre of the card but go off in pairs to certain other areas of the heatsink that sites below the IceQ branded cooler.

The fan used has a bright blue colour and is quite unique in design by having a mixture of singular blades as well as fin style vented plastic around the very edge. This helps by building up force to expel hot air towards the rear of the card where it can be exhausted out.

The back of the card shows the green PCB and all of the relevant mounting points for the large cooler that sits on the other side.

To power this card, you will require a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express power adapter, though you are able to use the twin Molex to PCI-Express power cable adapters that HIS kindly supplied with the card.

If you are thriving more power, you are able to run this card in CrossFireX mode using the two connectors on the top of the card to give you better performance than just using the single card.

Connections on the card include two DVI ports, a HDMI port and two Mini DisplayPorts. HIS as said earlier, supply various cables and adapters so that you can use this card with Eyefinity. As this card is a “Mix” based card, it allows you to use the HDMI port towards the Eyefinity setup, so that more expensive DisplayPort monitors are necessary. With this in mind we have found that using the HDMI port with Futuremark benchmark applications caused some problems of which HIS are looking into and will update us in due course.