Monday, December 13th 2010
PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 Pictured
With its launch not too far, AMD partners are busy sending their Radeon HD 6970 samples to reviews. It is inevitable then, that some would actually post pictures of those on the web ahead of launch. Some such pictures made it to HardwareLuxx.de, which shows PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 in fresh out of its retail box. The card, and the box itself, reveal quite a bit about the HD 6970. To begin with, Radeon HD 6970 (and HD 6950), are high-end single GPU graphics cards based on AMD's new "Cayman" high-end GPU. The HD 6970 is about as long as a Radeon HD 5870 (which it's intended to replace), and retains product design carried forward from the HD 6800 series graphics cards.
The HD 6970 from PowerColor sports 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, perhaps some of the memory chips are located on the reverse side of the PCB, which is why a back-plate is used to cool them. The top side of the card reveals the power connectors: one 8-pin, and a 6-pin PCI-E power; two CrossFire bridge fingers, and a tiny switch. It is rumored that this switch lets users select between two BIOS ROM chips present on the cards; one chip is programmable, and partners can store an overclocked profile, while the other is not programmable, and stores the AMD reference profile. It gives users a nice fallback in case they brick the card with a bad BIOS.
Another revelation is that HD 6970 supports an updated AMD Eyefinity feature set that lets users connect four displays to the card (instead of three on the previous generation non-Eyefinity6 cards). Display connectivity includes two DVI, one HDMI 1.4a, and two DisplayPort 1.2. PowerColor's HD 6970 should be out by mid-December (in this week).
Source:
HardwareLuxx.de
The HD 6970 from PowerColor sports 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, perhaps some of the memory chips are located on the reverse side of the PCB, which is why a back-plate is used to cool them. The top side of the card reveals the power connectors: one 8-pin, and a 6-pin PCI-E power; two CrossFire bridge fingers, and a tiny switch. It is rumored that this switch lets users select between two BIOS ROM chips present on the cards; one chip is programmable, and partners can store an overclocked profile, while the other is not programmable, and stores the AMD reference profile. It gives users a nice fallback in case they brick the card with a bad BIOS.
125 Comments on PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 Pictured
All Infos and Benches are here : www.hardwareluxx.de/community/f14/amd-radeon-hd-6970-alle-technischen-daten-update-2-a-768017-7.html Post 167
Can't wait to see how these perform.
I'm not saying it's not marketable, just that it is not faster than the 580.
But since I haven't see an official review here, I cannot be definitive on my opinion - still I feel that ducatti is probably telling the truth.
Maybe new drivers will fix some lack of performance.
The Ducatti dude post puts the 6970 at 8% slower than a gtx 480. So it's only 5-8% better than a 5870?
Given BFBC2 is DX11, and the 6970 seems to do well on DX11, i'm calling that a crock of poo.
I'll wait for W1zz's review. All this leaky speculation and homemade tables sucks balls.
Another week of hanging out for W1zzies Benchies™. When does the NDA actually end?
Didn't see any memory chip on the rear side.
Until then, all else is BS:)
On topic, I never expected this card to be faster than the 580. It was designed to beat the 480(and it will) and was well into production when the 580 hit.
Its actually a good thing it means the 6970 will be cheap. Its always about price/performance.
benchmarks are useless, if it IS a dual GPU card. why? cause it likely has no crossfire profiles on whatever leaked drivers they're testing with...