Final Thoughts

Diamond indeed came quick out of the gate and managed to offer us a good performance increase that yielded a consistent couple of FPS across the board. In the end it was just those few FPS in all those games that helped the HD 6970 pick the reference GTX 480 off, which is what we had hoped the HD 6970 would achieve.

It's been a while since we've looked at anything from Diamond, but it's good to see the magic is still there. They seem to want to offer a good overclock out of the box and by offering it faster than most other companies they've managed to stand out from the pack which consists of reference designed and reference clocked cards.

The HD 6970 on a whole we feel is a good product and when paired up with a second we really see some strong performance from the model. Throw in a pair of these pre overclocked offerings from Diamond and you'll find yourself staring down the barrel of some serious performance.

Overclocking is for everyone and some people simply prefer to be able to pull a card out of the box and get a bit of extra performance. What you don't want, though, is for some company to slap the "OC" label on a card when they don't bump the memory and only give the core a 10MHz boost. We're glad Diamond hasn't done that and has instead chosen to go hard with the OC.