PowerColor's HD 6970 Devil 13 impresses with very high clock speeds out of the box - when turbo mode is enabled via a little switch. When it is disabled, the card will run at AMD reference design clocks. PowerColor intended the normal mode to be a low noise, low power operating mode that is optimized for casual gamers that spend a lot of time in doing desktop work. However, due to the fan and blade design chosen, the card ends up being noisier than most other cards available today, when running in idle. It seems the fan motor is not really designed to run quiet, at low RPMs at all. On the other hand, temperatures of the card are quite low, which is certainly an effect of the increased fan speed.
In our testing we saw limited additional overclocking beyond PowerColor's Turbo clocks, which might be disappointing to overclockers, but can also be useful to users who don't want to waste their time with tweaking and rather start gaming at maximized performance immediately.
PowerColor chose an impressive accessory kit, especially the included Wiha screwdriver set stands out here. Wiha is a brand chosen by professionals across all industries and countries, personally I'm using their screwdrivers too - these are not cheap chinese screwdrivers. The kit PowerColor included with the Devil 13 has a retail value of around 60 Euros/USD, which certainly adds to the card's pricing.
Talking about pricing, according to PowerColor the card retails at $549. Compared to the $349 for a typical HD 6970, this is a massive price increase that is not justified by anything the card offers. A GeForce GTX 580 costs below $500 now and is 10% faster. Even if the screwdriver set adds 60$ to the card's price, there's still a $100 difference to what I would consider reasonable for a card like this. That's also the reason why the score is so low and there is no award for the card. If PowerColor could bring down the price of the card to $400 or below (with screwdrivers or not) then I could imagine a score of 9.0 with TPU's Recommended Award.