![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , December 14, 2010
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 Video Card Review
AMD is launching its new Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950. These two GPUs round out AMD’s high-end Radeon HD 6000 family of single-GPU video cards. Priced surprisingly low for the performance, these two cards are ready to to deliver solid value in the high end market place. Spending your holiday cash wisely, just got easy.
Evaluation Method
We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.
Test System Setup
We will be using a MSI Eclipse SLI X58 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.
While it might be "overkill," we use the Core i7-920 processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to prevent our evaluation from being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7-920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.
AMD supplied us with a driver which we are using for all AMD video cards here. The Catalyst Control Center reports the version to be: 8.79.6.2-101206a-109984E which is based on Catalyst 10.11. For the NVIDIA GPUs we are using 263.09 Beta.
