Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 6950 has been released in mid-December. Both the HD 6950 and the HD 6970 are using a new VLIW4 shader architecture as opposed to the VLIW5 configuration of previous cards. Great news came for HD 6950 users in late December in the form of our HD 6950 to HD 6970 modding article, which describes how you can unlock the shaders on the HD 6950 to the same configuration as on the HD 6970.

PowerColor has built upon this and offers their HD 6950 PCS++ with a custom cooler, custom PCB and a BIOS preinstalled that lets you complete the unlocking progress by the flick of a little switch. With a price increase of $15 over the reference design cards, the price increase of the PowerColor HD 6950 PCS ++ over the HD 6950 reference design does not seem too bad either.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI Adapter
• Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter
• CrossFire Bridge
• PCI-Express Power Cable (not pictured)

The Card

PowerColor is using a large dual-fan heatpipe cooler on their card, the PCB is a custom PowerColor design.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, two mini-DisplayPorts and one HDMI port. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to four HD 6900 cards of any model from any vendor in CrossFire.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.