Reviews - AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB graphics card review

[HEXUS]

Better than a GeForce GTX 560 Ti?

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[sam3]

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

[EzyRyder]

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

[warejon9]

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?

[scaryjim]

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!

[EzyRyder]

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)