Introduction

I'm a huge fan of the HD 6950 1GB; it brings the power of the HD 6950 to the table without the price tag that is associated with the 2GB version of the card that launched originally. Already impressed with the 1GB version from Sapphire we looked at a bit back, we'll today be having a look at the reference AMD one.

Instead of just doing the boring ol' thing and sliding it into our testbed by itself and seeing it inevitably performing near identical to the previous Sapphire we looked at, we instead paired it with the said Sapphire version and looked at CrossFire performance.

Due to the fact it's an AMD reference card, we don't have any sort of package going on, so instead we'll just have a quick look at the card, its specifications and then just roll into the benchmark line-up.

The Card

The HD 6950 1GB doesn't hold any surprises since it carries the reference design. We've just got that typical black and red cooler with the fan that sits down the end. Power comes in the form of two 6-Pin PCI-E power connectors and closer to the front we've got two CrossFire connectors and our little dual BIOS switch.

Connectivity doesn't hold any surprises; we've got a Dual-Link DVI, Single-Link DVI, HDMI and two Mini-DisplayPort connectors.

Specifications

Continuing on with the fact that we're dealing with a reference card, we're of course just going to see reference clocks. This means that our core comes in at 800MHz while our 1GB of GDDR5 carries with it a 5000MHz QDR clock.

The main thing we want to make sure of here is that we're of course running CrossFire and you can see down the bottom that it's indeed enabled and 2 GPUs are running.