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[O/C] AMD HD6970 Graphics Card Review

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AMD HD 6970 Graphics Card Review
by Jeremy Vaughan (hokiealumnus)

AMD6970-12-300x135.jpg

It’s that time again; time for AMD to release another flagship that is! This time it’s their current single GPU flagship, right on the heels of their new Phenom II x6 1100T Black Edition

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Leave it to our news team to push out new hardware benches right after NDA lifts :D
 
Jeremy, thanks for the wonderful write-up. this has all the info you could need on this card to make a decision as to what to buy, and more importantly, what to expect from it.

i would also expect there to be a new AB coming out this week also, to allow those voltage tweaks you so desire.
 
Good article. It will be interesting to see what these cards can do once the voltage and oc limits are gone.
 
Excellent review Jeremy:thup:, great to see our forums bringing such a top class review on the eve of a launch, thanks for your hard work making it happen:salute:
 
Thanks for all the kind words folks!

Definitely looking forward to that new AB HousERaT, I'll post some updated clocks/benches in here when I'm able. Just the tiniest voltage bump will get 6000 in 3DMark11. Can't wait to see how far it will really go. :D
 
Good review. Wanted to see besides DirectX 11 topics how Arma II stresses the GPU. Also maybe some brief subtitles to the slides. Also I noticed the ATi Brand name drop.
 
Good review. Wanted to see besides DirectX 11 topics how Arma II stresses the GPU. Also maybe some brief subtitles to the slides. Also I noticed the ATi Brand name drop.
Yep, they dropped it with the earlier 68xx release.

I'd like to include more games, but there are SO many it's tough to choose which ones. Plus our audience consists of gamers and benchers. Being one of the latter, I tend to focus on those. I don't plan on running ten different game benches -you can see that on other sites- but wouldn't argue with introducing one or two more in the future. No guarantees, but I'll look into it.

You guys have been slashdotted (by IMOG):

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/15/1319218

You might want to pop over there to answer questions. -- Paul
Done; thanks for pointing that out!
 
Comments cleaned up... Axe grinding is welcome in my inbox, but not in these article comments.

Nice work Hokie, and thanks for pumping this out under real world limitations, and coming out with some great results.
 
For what is worth I will post some benchmarks of the 6970 vs GTX 580, GTX 570, 5970 and 5870 in the next couple of days to supplement Hokie's review, that way we can expand the picture as far as relative performance is concerned, that is if Splat, IMOG and Hokie are OK with it.
 
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Was kinda hoping at least OCforums would do a review on the 10.12 betas, looks like another 10.11 benchmark. :(

Damn there are also no GTX 580 comparisons in the game graphs either!
 
For what is worth I will post some benchmarks of the 6970 vs GTX 580, GTX 570, 5970 and 5870 in the next couple of days to supplement Hokie's review, that way we can expand the picture as far as relative performance is concerned, that is if Splat, IMOG and Hokie are OK with it.

Now that would be the icing on the cake... :bday:
 
Was kinda hoping at least OCforums would do a review on the 10.12 betas, looks like another 10.11 benchmark. :(

Damn there are also no GTX 580 comparisons in the game graphs either!

For what it's worth, the drivers given to us were pre-release press drivers that happened to be 10.11 with the 69xx added to them. I tried the pre-release 10.12 we were given and it didn't get along with the card for whatever reason. Haven't had time to try the official 10.12 yet.

I agree it would have been very nice to have better comparison cards. It's just one of those things...you can only bench what you have. Thankfully we have AMD's current top dog, so now all we need to do is obtain NVIDIA's high-end for comparison. With each review, the comparison chart grows (until the next generation test rig comes into play, then I just have to re-bench those cards still in my office :) ).
 
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