Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 6950 & HD 6970 have been on the market for quite a while. Once a reference design matures, AMD allows board partners to customize the design and change PCB layout, cooling and clock speeds.

PowerColor's Vortex thermal solution has been introduced first with the HD 5770 Vortex, and now appears as an improved version on the HD 6950, called Vortex II. Instead of a single fan, two Vortex-adjustable fans are available. The Vortex design allows the user to tweak the fan configuration to employ unused space in the case for additional cooling performance - at least that's what PowerColor claims.



The card also comes with well-increased clock speeds out of the box and support for software voltage control.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• Mini-DisplayPort to DP adapter cable
• CrossFire Bridge
• DVI to Analog VGA Adapter

The Card

PowerColor's HD 6950 Vortex II uses a red PCB with matching cooler. Even though the design uses only few colors it does look a bit plasticky.


The card requires two slots in your system. I set the fan on the right to the highest Vortex position to give you a feel for how much the card extends into the third slot in this mode.


Display connectivity is two DVI ports (one single-link, one dual-link), 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. Board partners are free to combine several TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort interface is DisplayPort 1.2 compliant which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.


You may combine up to four HD 69xx cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. 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.