AMD Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 Video Card Review

The AMD Radeon HD 6970 (Cont’d)

In Figure 13, you can see the video card with its cooler removed and, in Figure 14, a close-up of the voltage regulator circuit, which is identical to the one used on the Radeon HD 6850.

Figure 13: Video card with the cooler removed

Figure 14: Voltage regulator circuit

Figure 15: Back of the video card

The GPU cooler used on the Radeon HD 6970 is identical to the one used on the Radeon HD 6950 and was already discussed.

The Radeon HD 6970 uses eight 2 Gbit GDDR5 chips, making its 2 GB video memory (2 Gbit x 8 = 2 GB). Each chip is connected to the GPU using a 32-bit data lane, making the video card’s 256-bit memory interface (32 bits x 8 = 256).

The chips used are H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C parts from Hynix, which support up to 3 GHz (6 GHz DDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 2.75 GHz (5.5 GHz DDR), there is a 500 MHz (9%) margin for you to increase the memory clock rate while keeping the chips inside the maximum they support. Of course you can always try to overclock the memory chips above their specs.

Figure 16: Memory chips

Now let’s check the results achieved by the Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 6970.