Manufacturer: HIS Price: $ US Author: Steve Date: 06/06/2011

[ Introduction ]

Today we have the long-awaited HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo which has been redesigned from the ground up. Sporting what HIS call a black hole impeller, this new graphics card receives a massive upgrade in the cooling department, said to deliver 23 degrees lower temperatures. Not only is the 6970 IceQ Turbo cooler and quieter, but it is also faster thanks to a little factory overclocking... Despite being released back in December of 2010, making the Radeon HD 6970 now 6 months old and likely near the end of its product cycle, HIS has just developed their latest and greatest version yet. The Radeon HD 6970 is an impressive GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and it certainly gave HIS a lot to work with. Codenamed “Cayman XT” the GPU consists of some 2640 million transistors in a die that measures just 389mm2, made even more impressive by the fact that it is designed using the 40nm process. Although AMD had originally planned to build the Radeon HD 6000 series using the 32nm process, they were forced to fall back on the older proven 40nm process as TSMC canceled its 32nm plans in favor of 28nm development. Despite sticking with the 40nm process, the high-end Radeon HD 6970 still proved to be an efficient graphics card, using roughly the same amount of power as the GeForce GTX 570 and considerably less than the GTX 580. That said, based on more than a dozen games we found that the Radeon HD 6970 was on average 15% slower than the GeForce GTX 580 at 1920x1200 and 12% slower at 2560x1600. Keeping that in mind, todays pricing makes the Radeon HD 6970 the better value product as the heavily modified HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo is still 24% cheaper than your typical GeForce GTX 580. That being said, the 6970 IceQ Turbo is also around 9% more expensive than most standard Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards, as it retails for $380 US opposed to $350 US. Still, that extra 9% should buy gamers more overclocking headroom. Furthermore it does deliver slightly more performance out of the box, as well as quieter and cooler performance. Another huge plus for gamers is the more flexible Eyefinity 3 support, which now does not require the use of DisplayPort and can instead be used with HDMI.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo in Detail Test System Specs Overclocking Results Benchmarks: Aliens vs. Predator, Battlefield Bad Company 2 Benchmarks: Call of Duty Black Ops, Crysis Warhead Benchmarks: Civilization V, Dragon Age II Benchmarks: Dirt 2, Metro 2033 Power Consumption & Temperatures Conclusion Next Page ->

ProX	Posted on: 06/08/2011 08:11 PM Now that is one massive graphics card! Not sure that I like the design though.

jrk	Posted on: 06/09/2011 02:09 AM Nice card but 2 late 2 the party. I am waiting for the 7000 series now!