AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

2011 is bound to be an exciting year for the graphics card market and it is already starting off in a big way with some heated competition between AMD and NVIDIA. Today AMD is officially launching their HD 6950 1GB which is supposed to compete with the new GTX 560 Ti at a highly competitive price point. But will it be enough to contend with a refre...

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[_dangtx_]

nice. so basically the 6950 is still a better buy, even in its 1gb form, doing the 560 in accross the board? :)

were talking stock clocks here.

[SKYMTL]

Personally, I think the GTX 560 TI is the better buy. It's more efficienct, quieter and has MUCH better overclocking headroom.

[_dangtx_]

allright, so for the few of us who fold+overclock, take the ti 560?

good review as always, btw :)

[terrybear]

Basing that on a review "sampled" 6950 1 gig. I think is still a lil reaching, thought I haven't read all the other reviews yet, I'm still likely to believe the retail 6950 1 gig'ers will still have alot of headroom for oc'in. Again, get a retail 6950 1 giger & a 560 ti, oc them head to head ... then see whom is a better buy. PLUS whom knows if prices of the 6950 1 gig come down more in the meantime.

Ohhhhh btw Sky, I didn't see in pics nor read any mention if the 1 gig model has the dual bios option in your review or the few I've read so far. Can you clairify for me/us if it did on your sample or not? If it doesn't it might make the extra gig or ram & upgradeability of a 6950 2 gig worth the extra $30-50.

Nice review as always :)

[SKYMTL]

As I said, my sample had the switch but remember it is an early engineering sample.

[techman95]

the two 1GB versions for sale on newegg have the holes for the switch but no switch or so it looks like in the pictures.

[heflys20]

Yeah, at stock performance, I'd go 6950.

[mikellini]

Originally Posted by SKYMTL

As I said, my sample had the switch but remember it is an early engineering sample.

I'm curious as to why you mentioned that "upgrade" hopefuls would have to wait for a 1GB version of the 6970... A bios from a 2GB won't work, for sure? What about an edited bios?

[pierrebai]

Originally Posted by terrybear

Basing that on a review "sampled" 6950 1 gig. I think is still a lil reaching, thought I haven't read all the other reviews yet, I'm still likely to believe the retail 6950 1 gig'ers will still have alot of headroom for oc'in.

Personally, I don't think the AMD HD6950 will attain the overclocking potential of the GTX560 in the short term, and here's why. The problem for AMD is how they decided to segment their video card and bin their chip vs. the way nvidia did it. If you look at the specs for the newest family of cards from each, you see different approach to binning.

AMD:
HD6950: 1408 cores at 800Mhz
HD6970: 1536 cores at 880Mhz

NVIDIA:
GTX560: 384 cores at 822Mhz
GTX570: 480 cores at 732Mhz

What we see is that AMD's high-spec card gains its performance advantage from a few more cores but an sizable clock boost. On the other hand, nvidia high-spec card gains its performance solely on the back of having a much greater number of cores, countering its lowered clock. This means that AMD is forced to bin their chips by their clocking potential, while nvidia is binning them by their number of functional cores. (Or, nvidia is forced to bin their chips with the best clocking potential as GTX560, giving the same end result.)

So what is the end result? We get AMD HD6950 that are frequently unlockable to its full cores potential (turning into a virtual HD6970) while we get the vidia GTX560 that have more overclock potential. That's why I don't think the HD6950 will attain the high overclock that are achieved by the GTX560.

OTOH, on the short term we get the opportunity to buy virtual HD6970 on the cheap. On the longer term, with better yields, we might get HD6950 that are more overclockable as more chips support high clocks and thus more of those binned for 6950 actually support high overclocking.