One of PowerColor's various non-reference design graphics card lines, the Vortex Edition, made its debut in June 2010, with the PowerColor HD 5770 Vortex Edition. The selling point of Vortex is the cooler fan, which is user-adjustable to an extent. PowerColor decided to roll out another Vortex Edition graphics card any time soon, this time it's the more popular high-end GPU, the Radeon HD 6950. In all likelihood, the PowerColor HD 6950 Vortex doesn't have anything new in terms of PCB design, it probably reuses the PCS+ PCB, but the innovations are held with the cooler.

The Vortex edition cooler uses two 80 mm fans, which are suspended on circular frames that are threaded and locked into the cooler shroud like screws. By twisting the fan frame, the user can adjust the distance between each fan and the heatsink below, thereby adjusting the fan's air-flow. If PowerColor's internal research (backed by thermal images) is to go by, the design helped increase cooling performance in case of the HD 5770 Vortex. Pulling the fan frames out comes at the expense of eating into clearance for the adjacent addon card, and that gives the user a level of control over the cooling performance. At this point, the clock speeds are not known. It's likely that PowerColor releases both 1GB and 2GB variants.