Saphire Radeon HD 6970 Review

It looks like it might be a while before TSMC is able to supply a 32nm card to either AMD or Nvidia. This means that both team red and team green are going to have to stick to the 40nm process that is available at the moment. The top single GPU card from AMD right now is the 6970, and I've managed to get my hands on a Saphire Radeon HD 6970, and I've been running it through it's paces. Let's take a look at the card and it's workings, shall we?

Powering the 6970 is the 40nm GPU core, code named Caymen. Packed onto that is 2.64 BILLION transistors! Clock speeds for the core measure in at 880MHz on core, and 2GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 5.5GHz. The GDDR5 memory utilizes at 256-bit memory bus, and according to AMD the 6970 will draw less than 200W when gaming.

The Caymen core promises better performance overall than the previous Barts core, but of particular note is improved tesselation performance, and the new anti-aliasing more known as EQAA. EQAA when combined with the increased bandwidth over Barts on the ROPs should provide a nice boost to anti-aliasing performance.

In an attempt to keep power consumption under control AMD has implemented the Power Tune system, which attempts to find the balance between clock speeds, thermal levels, and actual power consumption by adjusting TDP levels through calculations on the card. In the end, what this means is that applications that draw large amounts of power, and thus generate large amounts of heat could result in clock speeds being lowered, and performance being capped off. This certainly doesn't sound good, but according to AMD, this is more of a safeguard against a worst case scenario. If your case is properly ventilated, and your ambient temperatures are reasonable, gaming should never be a problem. Synthetic benchmarks may show some impact, but only in certain tests. Because of this possible limitation in ( frankly meaningless ) synthetic utilities, an addition has been made to the AMD overdrive utility of the Catalyst Control Center. The Power Control setting dial allows you to dial the TDP max down 50% or up 50%. Adjusting to the maximum +50% power rating may have no impact at all, however it may increase overclocking performance. I'll look into that later. At the bottom end -50% of the default may get a bit of power saving, with limited impact on performance.

Additional features for eyefinity, video and 3d video performance are also present, but I would say that's enough talking about the bits bytes, and numbers of the card. Let's have a look at the ol' girl and see how she poses for the camera.

My previous few cards were from XFX, and it was quite clear that XFX took a lot of pride in their packing. I can't really say the same for Saphire. While the outer box has a very nice young lady, with some very oversized weaponry, the inner box is a basic brown box.

Once out of the box, the immense size of this card becomes clear. Closer to the camera you can see the various video connections. Two dual link DVI connections, with a couple display port connections, and an HDMI connection. If you were so inclined you could attach a nice little array of monitors to this one card.

Of course the 6970 comes with a dual slot cooler, and hidden at the top of the card near the rear plate connectors is the two crossfire connectors, which can allow for more options in multi-card configurations. Noticeably absent though is the little switch found on most 6970 cards that allows you to revert to a back up functioning BIOS if your primary BIOS goes bad after any flashing attempts. I don't plan on doing any BIOS flashing though, so I do not mind so very much.

Fitting into my Antec Dark Fleet DF85 full tower case is no problem for the 6970, however in a smaller mid tower case mounting the card onto your motherboard could be a problem as the card measures in at over 11inches according to my measuring tape. This includes the length of the cooler sheath that extends a bit beyond the actual board. The dual 6pin PCIexpress power connectors are mounted on the top of the card, which should mean there is little chance wiring up your card will prevent you from proper mounting, because the PCI express power cables don't extend the length of the card.

Now that the card has found it's home, let's start 'er up and see how she performs in gaming situations!

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