PowerColor HD 6950 Vortex II 2 GB

Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 6950 & HD 6970 have been on the market for quite a while. Once a reference design matures, AMD allows board partners to customize the design and change PCB layout, cooling and clock speeds.

PowerColor's Vortex thermal solution has been introduced first with the HD 5770 Vortex, and now appears as an improved version on the HD 6950, called Vortex II. Instead of a single fan, two Vortex-adjustable fans are available. The Vortex design allows the user to tweak the fan configuration to employ unused space in the case for additional cooling performance - at least that's what PowerColor claims.



The card also comes with well-increased clock speeds out of the box and support for software voltage control.

Radeon HD 6950 Market Segment Analysis

	Radeon HD 6870	GeForce GTX 470	GeForce GTX 560 Ti	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 6950	PowerColor HD 6950 Vortex	Radeon HD 6970	GeForce GTX 570
Shader Units	1120	448	384	1600	1408	1408	1536	480
ROPs	32	40	32	32	32	32	32	40
Graphics Processor	Barts	GF100	GF114	Cypress	Cayman	Cayman	Cayman	GF110
Transistors	1700M	3200M	1950M	2154M	2640M	2640M	2640M	3000M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1280 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	1280 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	320 bit
Core Clock	900 MHz	607 MHz	823 MHz	850 MHz	800 MHz	850 MHz	880 MHz	732 MHz
Memory Clock	1050 MHz	837 MHz	1002 MHz	1200 MHz	1250 MHz	1300 MHz	1375 MHz	950 MHz
Price	$200	$250	$230	$280	$275	$300	$340	$330