Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950

Overclocking & Performance Summary Chart

This editor has his own set of criteria for overclocking the HD 6970 and the HD 6950. We do not raise the fan speed nor do we increase the voltage. Even so, we found Cayman to be just a bit hotter-running than our HD 5870 and the cooler is slightly noisier under full load.  For overclocking we used Catalyst Control Center and we we were disappointed that we could not get more than +40 MHz on either core; the HD 6870 is evidently limited by its core and the HD 6950 is limited by its software.  Here are our HD 6970 clocks:

Reference >> the new OC:

880/1375 MHz >> 920/1375 MHz (higher resulted in instability):

And now here are our HD 6950 clocks

Reference >> the new OC:

800/1250 MHz >> 840/1325 MHz (the max allowed by CCC)

An overclock of +40 MHz on each core brought us some decent performance increases which you can see in the Performance Summary.

Performance Summary and Overclocked Cayman results

Here is our performance summary which compares both the stock and overclocked performance of the HD 6970 and the HD 6950 against the HD 5870 and HD 6870 as well as the the  GTX 570 plus the GTX 480 and GTX 580. The games are grouped mostly by DX9 > DX10 > and DX11 and somewhat in chronological order of release. Average framerates are compared.

There you have it.  Let’s head over to the last page for our price to performance comments and our conclusion.