HIS Radeon HD 6970 2GB Video Card Overclocked

Final Thoughts

You might've seen some people getting in excess of 1000MHz on the core of HD 6970s and the first thing we have to say is that it's not that the HIS HD 6970 2GB we're using is a poor overclocking card. Under 3DMark 11 and Vantage we could benchmark at 1000MHz on the core, but Heaven would see crashes, and so did Batman AA.

Due to the way we offer these overclocking articles in that we test it in every benchmark verses just one or two like others, we have to make sure our OC is capable of completing all our tests.

Falling short of the 1000MHz mark isn't a huge deal, though. 6GHz QDR on the memory is just a huge number and overall the performance out of the model when overclocked is very strong.

On the topic of the HIS HD 6970, there's nothing to really say about it that we haven't said about other HD 6970s that follow the reference design. You've got a good model with a strong price tag that's going to play a lot of games with no real dramas at the higher resolutions.

Is it worth going to the effort to overclock the model? Absolutely, and you can see in certain situations that the extra MHz really helps make game play a bit smoother. The best example of that is in Mafia II where we see at stock we're just getting over that 60 FPS average we want. With the overclock we're pushing a bit further away from it and the difference between a 63 FPS average and a 67 FPS average is noticeable as it helps lift the minimum FPS up.

Another great HD 6970 and today we're able to see the kind of extra performance we can get when it comes to overclocking the card with additional voltage. For some it's going to be worth the effort, while for others they'll be happy with the stock clocks. Of course, there's always the option to buy a pre-overclocked one like the HIS Turbo we looked at recently.