Review AMD Radeon HD 6950 – The Feature-rich, High-end Performer
Graphics card
Moving on to the photo session. This how a reference Radeon HD 6950 looks like. At a glance, it may seem identical with the Radeon HD 6950 we’ve previously tested. The board is slightly bigger though.
The reference heatsink relies on the Vapor Chamber technology, and it’s actually quite good in suppressing the heat. We recorded a maximum temperature of 82 degree Celsius in full-load condition with the fan spinning at 35%. Idle temperature hovered around 42 degree Celsius with the fan reverting back to 23%.
The PCI Express 2.1 x16 interface on this card is backward compatible with older PCI Express versions (2.0 or 1.0).
You can connect up to four HD 6950s in CrossfireX mode using the connector on the upper part of this card. Note that you will need a certain motherboard based on Intel’s or AMD’s chipset to utilize this capability.
Power is supplied to the Radeon HD 6950 through a pair of 6-pin PCI Express connectors.
On the backplate, you can find two DVI connectors, one HDMI 1.4a port, and two mini-Display Port 1.2 connectors, providing plenty of options to hook up your display device onto this card.
Last but not least, this is the card’s PCB layout as seen from the back. A metal plate covers most of the board’s surface. It seems like the metal plate is intended to maximize heat dissipation on this side.