[O/C]AMD HD 6950 Video Card Review

The AMD HD 6950 is the second best single-GPU card in the AMD graphics card lineup. It is possible to flash the card to use the 6970 BIOS, so the HD 6950 looks like it may be able to pack a punch and seriously rival its competitors.

The HD 6950 features a hefty 2 GB of GDDR5 RAM, an 800 MHz core speed and a 1250 MHz RAM speed. The 6900 series features several new features, but since these have been mentioned in depth...

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Nice write-up Matt

Looks like the 6950 is better value than the 6970 then?

Very nice review!!! No game comparisons though?

Hoping to be able to include those in the next one, EarthDog. I haven't had time to mess with those yet unfortunately.

Matt

Great! Looking forward to it!

I'm going to get this one when Newegg gets some more, unless someone knows where one is for sale somewhere else or has one.

Man, I'm gonna spend way to much just to use the mobo I got at the party.

Chance set me up with good choices for ram and a 1090, that's on order..

Summed it up nicly

However you didn't touch on the power control option.
This card will not let you go over the TDP so your overclocking results may be lower than what they could have been if you allowed for +20% TDP.
This is a setting in the CAT driver in overdrive.

Basically I am concerned about this as I am getting conflicting information if the 6950 -> 6970 mod also increases the TDP wall of 200 to 250watts like on the 6970.

And yes the mod is supper simple, just picked up my 6950 last night and the mod take a few min max.

Awesome review

I'm glad to see an independent review of the 6950 on here. Very well written and informative.

Regarding the unlocking of the 6950:

After flashing my Gigabyte 6950 to the 6970 bios, I would run stress tests / games and my display would go into "sleep" mode and the video card fan would fire up to 100%. Worrying about warranty, I flashed back to the 6950 (the system would stay on long enough to accomplish this) and eventually I worked up the nerve to try the "modified" 6950 bios with shaders unlocked. This bios worked beautifully and I haven't had any problems since (1+ weeks now).

Thought this might be informative to anyone having the black screen / fan going nuts issue. I would definitely recommend skipping the full 6970 flash and go with the modified 6950 bios.

Cheers!
-Rob C

Well informed by another member here "Rattle" which brought up a very good point.

If flashing the 6950 to the 6970, best way to do it is unlock the shaders on the card and go from there. Use MSI Afterburner, unlock the overclock feature in the main config file, make sure that the CCC overdrive is turned off (in my case I re-locked it) and go to it. Using the 6970 bios gives the ram more volts 1.6 vs 1.5. In my experience it didn't yield any better results.

Overall so far 900/1100 with stock 1.1V for my 6950... not bad in my book. Defiantly best value around for high end performance for cheap.... ish price.

For those of you who don't know, you can unclock a 6950 to a 6970. Threads about it on Overclock.net, TomsHardware, etc.

There are threads all over this site about it...(and a few posts above yours) we know!

Welcome!