GIGABYTE Radeon HD 6950 2GB Video Card Overclocked

The Card

The card is based on the reference design which isn't any surprise, and I know that the only difference between companies around launch is only the sticker on the cooler, but I love this sticker! It's hard to tell, but it's a reflective sticker and just looks really cool. It's a nice design and when a lot of the cards carry the same reference design and package, sometimes it's the look of the card that's going to help seal the deal when it comes to deciding which one to buy.

Jumping around the rest of the card, we continue to see all those reference features; two 6-Pin PCI-E power connectors on the back, two Crossfire connectors and our little BIOS switch. Connectivity also doesn't hold any surprises with a Dual-Link DVI, Single-Link DVI, HDMI 1.4 and two Mini DisplayPort connectors.

Specifications and Overclocking

Continuing on with the reference design, the clocks are of course reference as well which puts the core in at 800MHz and the memory clock at 5000MHz QDR. Using Afterburner, though, it was time to bump the voltage up to 1.3v and start moving those clocks north.

What we ended up with is a core clock of 970MHz; this is an increase of over 150MHz. As for the 2GB of GDDR5 memory, that gets clocked up to 5460MHz QDR which is almost a 500MHz QDR increase, which is very impressive. It'll be interesting to see how its performance goes when compared to reference clocked cards.