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 III introduces their new Twin Frozr III cooler and acts as successor to the HD 6950 Twin Frozr II. It offers higher clock speeds out of the box and also comes with AMD's dual BIOS switch.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• 2x PCI-Express Power Cable
• Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter
• DVI to Analog VGA Adapter
• Long CrossFire Bridge

The Card

MSI's new Twin Frozr III cooler brings a more powerful, industrial design than the Twin Frozr II we have seen before. I'm not sure why there is such a long "lip" near the end of the cooler which extends well over the PCB and does nothing but use up space.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPort outputs. 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 69xx cards 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.