Introduction

AMD recently released their Radeon HD 6900 Series which delivers high-end 3D performance based around the new Cayman GPU. The new Series boasts improvements in power consumption while increasing performance over last generation. Most noteworthy, however, is the possibility to unlock a Radeon HD 6950 into a HD 6970 by a simple BIOS flash.

MSI's HD 6950 Twin Frozr II is the first custom design HD 6950 to reach our labs. It uses a custom PCB design and MSI's well-known Twin Frozr II cooling solution. The card is overclocked out of the box too, but the 10 MHz increase is so small it will barely register in our benchmarks.

Packaging

MSI's standard package shows the card on the front and additional product detail on the back.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI adapter
• Mini-DP to DP adapter
• 2x PCI-Express power cable
• Long CrossFire bridge

The Card

MSI is using a custom version of the PCB and their own Twin Frozr II cooler that we have seen on a variety of cards from the company.


HD 6950 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 Series cards in CrossFire for increased performance or improved image quality settings.


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.