PowerColor's HD 6950 Vortex II introduces a new and innovative thermal solution. Several technical innovations in the cooler make it a much better heatsink than the reference design. Everything is improved - the HD 6950 Vortex cooler runs quieter and cooler than the reference design, even though it comes overclocked out of the box, and hence puts additional heat load on the cooling system. PowerColor also uses an adjustable fan feature on the Vortex II, which enables the user to increase the distance between fan and heatsink. According to PowerColor this promises better temperatures and less noise. In our testing the differences were too small to be of any significance, without measuring equipment there is absolutely no difference between both fan configurations. Even though this single feature did not turn out to be a game changer, performance of the cooler overall is very good and definitely better than the reference design. During testing I noticed a small flaw in the mounting system design which results in reduced mounting pressure, causing increased temperatures. PowerColor is already aware of the issue and expects it to be fixed in retail boards.
In terms of performance, HD 6950 Vortex II sits about in the middle between HD 6950 and HD 6970 thanks to its increased clocks out of the box. This clock increase also results in higher power consumption than HD 6950 reference, but the increase is reasonable. Instead of the more expensive Volterra VRM, PowerColor has chosen to use the system by CHiL which works almost as good and offers software voltage control too, so overclocking enthusiasts will like this card too. Our sample would also let us mod its shader count to HD 6970 levels, whether this will be possible on final retails cards is probable but not guaranteed.
In terms of pricing, PowerColor is asking $299 from potential buyers - a $30 price premium over the reference design HD 6950. In my opinion this is a bit steep, even though the cooler does bring some innovation. Other board vendors offer similar performing HD 6950s at $280 - $290, which is where I would put the HD 6950 Vortex II, too, when asked for what the right pricing for this card would be.