We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Mittoni, Noctua and Corsair.

We're going to be having a look at the GIGABYTE HD 6950 2GB at 970MHz / 5460MHz QDR against a number of cards, but some of the main ones we'll be comparing it against are the HD 6950 at reference clocks and also the HD 6970 at reference clocks.

Apart from those two cards, we've also got the HD 6800s by themselves and in Crossfire along with the GTX 570, GTX 580 and GTX 480 in single form.

Let's get started!

3DMark 11

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/
Buy It Here

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world's most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC's gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

Big gains straight away that put the card faster than the reference clocked HD 6970.