AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB graphics card review

by Tarinder Sandhu on 15 February 2011, 07:54 4.0

Final thoughts and rating

AMD's Radeon HD 6950 1GB graphics card's arrival is an obvious move to scupper NVIDIA's plans for performance leadership at the £200 price point. Looking very much like its 2GB-equipped counterpart and performing nigh-on identically in a wide range of benchmarks, the 1GB card is a sensible choice if your budget is absolutely limited to said £200.

Scoring highly in both of our bang4buck and bang4watt metrics and a better bet than a highly overclocked Radeon HD 6870, the only downside to the card is an inability to flash it to Radeon HD 6970 speeds, which is possible on the 2GB variant.

Faster than an out-of-the-box NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti and based on solid technology, we can recommend the Radeon HD 6950 1GB if you play most of your games at a full-HD resolution.

The Good

Performs practically the same as 2GB card
Faster than out-of-the-box GeForce GTX 560 Ti

The Bad

Comparatively limited overclocking headroom
Average cooler (reference card)

HEXUS Rating

AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB

HEXUS Awards

AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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Can you unlock this card (like the previous 2gb 6950) into a 6970?

The switch is there but there is a comment in the review saying that you can't?

Could it be because its only got 1gb of ram, whereas the 6970 atm has 2gb. Maybe if they released a 1gig 6970 it could work?

There is no 6970 1GB, so you'd have to hack an existing BIOS otherwise you'll have a BIOS claiming twice as much memory as is actually on the card - not a good thing ;) I believe in theory it might be possible, but you'd have to know a lot about the internal workings of the BIOS file to do it. Of course, having the BIOS switch available removes some of the risk, but I believe that some partner 6950 1GB cards are being released without said switch?

Given the lower overclocking headroom, I wonder if these cards are also getting lower-binned chips? That'd be another factor helping AMD shave the asking price without hitting partner profits…

What interests me is that there was a lot of discussion when the 6950 / 6970 came out about their excellent performance at high res and if this meant we'd now hit the point where 2GB of RAM on a reference card actually made sense. These results seem to refute that, which suggests that AMD have simply come up with an architecture that works really well at higher resolutions!

True, some fair points up there.

Most 6950s will reach 920-975 Mhz when volts are raised to stock 6970 volts (1.175m instead of 1.100m)