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Review: XFX Radeon HD 6950 2GB DD XXX

by Tarinder Sandhu on 21 October 2011, 08:42 3.5

Tags: XFX (HKG:1079)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa7pw

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Bang4buck, Bang4watt, and overclocking

Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance and value for money.

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 2,560x1,600 frame-rates for six games, normalised them1 and taken account of today's pricing.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen six different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new-release GPUs.

Consequently, the table below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.

Value analysis at 2,560x1,600

Graphics card Aggregate FPS Normalised FPS Current price Bang4buck1 Power consumption2 Bang4watt3
Sapphire Radeon HD 6990 (4,096MB) 406.8 337.2 £530 0.64 352 0.96
2x HIS Radeon HD 6970 in CrossFire (4,096MB) 427.7 354.4 £520 0.68 465 0.76
HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2,048MB) 232.0 152.6 £260 0.59 193 0.79
2x Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 in CrossFire (4,096MB) 390.8 319.9 £400 0.80 303 1.06
Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 TOXIC 215.1 135.9 £235 0.58 176 0.78
XFX Radeon HD 6950 (2,048MB) 213.4 133.3 £230 0.58 166 0.80
Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 (2,048MB) 207.6 126.7 £200 0.63 130 0.98
PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 X2 (2,048MB) 299.0 229.5 £315 0.73 317 0.72
2x AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1,024MB) 304.9 240.1 £280 0.86 295 0.81
AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1,024MB) 173.0 96.7 £140 0.69 124 0.78
ASUS ROG MARS II (3,072MB) 434.3 360.9 £1,149 0.31 490 0.74
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3,072MB) 361.9 305.6 £600 0.51 376 0.81
2x ASUS GeForce GTX 580 in SLI (3,072MB) 423.4 356.5 £700 0.51 524 0.68
ASUS GeForce GTX 580 (1,536MB) 256.9 196.8 £350 0.56 256 0.55
2x ASUS GeForce GTX 570 in SLI (2,560MB) 365.7 309.1 £500 0.62 419 0.74
ASUS GeForce GTX 570 (1,280MB) 218.6 152.4 £250 0.61 205 0.74
Point of View GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1,024MB) 175.1 109.5 £160 0.68 165 0.66

1 the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.

2 the GPU power consumption is derived from subtracting a flat rate of 100W - indicating system power-draw without a card - from the Call of Duty: Black Ops load figure. While this figure isn't solely indicative of power pulled by the GPU, as the CPU also throttles up, it's a better metric than using peak system-draw alone.

3 the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against GPU power-draw that's shown in the table: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Just Cause 2.

Summary

While we have little but praise for the card itself, a high street price is manifested, rather obviously, with a low HEXUS.bang4buck.

Overclocking

XFX has set a conservative 830MHz clock on this card while not overclocking memory at all. Righting this egregious wrong, we cranked up the core voltage to 1.2V and the clocks to a stable 910MHz core and 5,550MHz memory. Running our benchmarks again at the 2,560x1,600 setting we noticed an across-the-board improvement of 6.8 per cent.