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To overclock the HD6970 today we used Catalyst Control Center initially, then pushed higher with the Sapphire TRIXX overclocking tool. All of our samples overclocked to almost identical levels so the screenshots may not be directly linked to the cards in this review. This is because they are all the same reference design from the same production line batch.
The HD6970 peaked at 950mhz. Memory reached 1475mhz (5900mhz effective). This is the an 18 percent overclock on the Hynix GDDR5 memory, we are very impressed with this.
If ever you needed to see the performance differences between the last generation and the current generation AMD graphics cards then this is a good test to run. Tessellation performance due to the architectural changes noted earlier shows that a single overclocked HD6970 is capable of performing close to the HD5870's in a Crossfire configuration!
At these overclocks, temperatures rose by around 3-4 C under load.
I think these are good boards, even though a lot of people will be disappointed with the fact the 580 is still leading the single card attack
@Sam: Not quite. The 5970 is still the fastest card. The GTX580 is definitely the fastest single chip.
The price is the biggest selling point. I dont think they are the performance killers we expected, but the 280 price for the 6970 means its actually only 30 more than the 5850 was at launch. thats quite a good figure for them to achieve. I think they are doing what they do against intel in the CPU sector. drop pricing as low as poss.
CFx is very good with these cards. the drivers must be much better than I last remember
@Faith – thats what I meant, ill be sure to make sure I analyse the text perfectly before posting next time 😉
these arent too shabby. good job from AMD. they hit the sweet spot on the pricing