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.