AMD Radeon HD 6970 review
An incredibly powerful card at an impressively reasonable price, its only competition comes from the cheaper HD 6950.
With all that covered, let’s get down to some performance figures. The HD 6970 is a very quick card, scoring highly in all our tests. Testing at a Full HD resolution with 4x anti-aliasing and Very High detail, it scored 41.9fps in our Crysis test, almost exactly the same as the GTX 580 with 41.0fps.
In our DirectX 11 Stalker test, the HD 6970 placed just ahead of the GTX 580, with 56.3fps compared to 54.7fps. However, in the newly released 3DMark 11 – run at our own custom settings of Performance preset, 1,920 x 1,080, 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering – the situations were reversed, with the GTX 580 scoring 1,985, to the HD 5970’s 1,854.
Being available for a surprisingly low £290 inc VAT, the HD 6970 is a better buy than Nvidia’s GTX 580 at a wallet-busting £380. Even so, it’s a lot to pay for a graphics card, especially when you can get very similar performance from its little sibling, the AMD Radeon HD 6950 for around £70 less.
For the purposes of this review, we were supplied with prices by card manufacturer HIS from www.overclockers.co.uk. Prices are likely to be volatile, however, with potentially-limited availability pushing prices higher. If you’re keen then we’d recommend getting in quick.
Basic Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Price | £290 |
| Rating | **** |
| Details | www.amd.com |
| Award | Ultimate |
| Interface | PCI Express x16 2.1 |
| Crossfire/SLI | CrossFire |
| Slots taken up | 2 |
| Brand | AMD |
| Graphics Processor | AMD Radeon HD 6970 |
| Memory | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory interface | 256-bit |
| GPU clock speed | 880MHz |
| Memory speed | 1.38GHz |
| Card length | 275mm |
Features | |
| Architecture | 1,536 stream processors |
| Anti aliasing | 24x |
| Anisotropic filtering | 16x |
Connectors | |
| DVI outputs | 2 |
| VGA outputs | 0 |
| S-video output | no |
| S-Video input | no |
| Composite outputs | no |
| Composite inputs | no |
| Component outputs | no |
| HDMI outputs | 1 |
| Power leads required | 1x 6-pin PCI Express, 1x 8-pin PCI Express |
Extras | |
| Accessories | N/A |
| Software included | none |
Benchmark Results | |
| 3DMark Vantage 1680 | N/A |
| Call of Duty 4 1680 4xAA | 88.9fps |
| Call of Duty 4 1440 4xAA | 89.3fps |
| Crysis 1680 High 4xAA | 73.2fps |
| Crysis 1440 High 4xAA | 85.1fps |
Buying Information | |
| Warranty | one-year RTB |
| Price | £290 |
| Supplier | http://www.overclockers.co.uk |
| Details | www.amd.com |