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.

As its predecessor, the Radeon HD 6970 GPU has been fabricated using the 40nm process, yet AMD has squeezed in 486 million more transistors and as a result the die size has increased by 16%.

The GPU core is clocked at 880MHz, 3.5% higher than the Radeon HD 5870, while the GDDR5 memory also operates slightly faster at 1375MHz (5.5GHz DDR). Pairing that frequency with a 256-bit wide memory bus gives the Radeon HD 6970 176GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, a 14.5% advantage over the HD 5870.

Being an IceQ “Turbo” version of the Radeon HD 6970 we expected to find some kind of factory overclocking, and we did. However HIS has boosted the GPU core clock speed by just 2%, providing a 900MHz frequency. The memory has also been overclocked and again the increase is rather underwhelming, as we saw a 2% increase resulting in an operating frequency of 1400MHz (5.6GHz DDR).

The Radeon HD 6970 also differs from the older HD 5870 on its core configuration. Whereas the HD 5870 featured 1600 SPUs, 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs, the new HD 6970 boasts of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and the same 32 ROPs (4% less SPUs and 20% more TAUs).

The AMD reference design uses a fairly large aluminum vapor chamber heatsink made up of 39 fins measuring 13.5cm long, 6.5cm wide, and 2.5cm tall. The heatsink is then cooled by a 75x20mm blower fan that draws air in from within the case and pushes it out through the back.

HIS has done away with the vapor chamber concept and gone with a large aluminum heatsink with a copper base, assisted by four huge 8mm copper heatpipes. The bulk of the heatsink measures 13.5cm long, 8cm wide and 3.5cm tall, making it considerably larger than the standard heatsink. A similar 75x20mm blower fan has been used, though the HIS design allows the fan to draw in more air from the topside as well as the underside.

This fan operates very quietly, helped by the impressively low 20 watt idle consumption of the Radeon HD 6970. When gaming the fan will of course spin up, as the card can consume up to 250 watts under load. That being said, at all times we found the fan barely audible, making the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo a perfect candidate for Crossfire.

Whereas the heatsink and fan design of the AMD reference cards are fully enclosed within a custom built housing, HIS has taken a more traditional design approach. The back side of the card is fully exposed showing off the blue PCB. While the large heatsink also cools the eight GDDR5 memory chips, the cards power circuitry is passively cooled using aluminium heatsinks.

In order to feed the card enough power the AMD specification calls for an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCI Express power connector and HIS has stuck with this configuration. This is the same setup that you will find on the Radeon HD 5970 (dual GPU) and GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards, so it's a configuration usually employed by the most demanding boards.

Naturally, the Radeon HD 6970 supports CrossfireX and therefore in the standard position we find a pair of connectors for bridging two or more cards together. The only other connectors are on the I/O panel. HIS has included a pair of dual DL-DVI connectors, a single HDMI 1.4a port, and two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 sockets, a typical configuration for a Radeon HD 6970.

It's worth noting that while all Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards can support a max resolution of 2560x1600 on up to three monitors, this requires the use of the DL-DVI ports and a DisplayPort connector. HIS has managed to allow Eyefinity 3 support using the HDMI port instead, providing a more flexible option. Still, for those that want to stick with the mini-DisplayPorts, that is also an option.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 920 (Overclocked @ 3.70GHz) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24) - Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB) - Asus GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) - Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB) - Palit GeForce GTX 470 (1280MB) - Gigabyte Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB) - HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo (2048MB) - Gigabyte Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) - VisionTek Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) - Asus Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) - HIS Radeon HD 5870 (1024MB) - Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) - OCZ ZX Series (850w) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 275.33 - AMD Catalyst 11.5b

Please note when testing the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo graphics card we ignored the factory overclocking and pushed the card to 970/5864MHz. Since the factory overclocking provided just 1-2fps more, we wanted to see what the 6970 IceQ Turbo could do when manually overclocked.

Another popular GPU overclocking program is MSI AfterBurner (previously RivaTuner). This software allows the user to increase the Core Voltage of most Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards. By increasing the voltage we could push the core as high as 1050MHz. However we were unable to get a completely stable overclock at this frequency and in fact were forced back down to 970MHz.

In the end we did use AfterBurner to overclock the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo, as it provides better monitoring information and greater overclocking flexibility when compared to the Catalyst Control Center.

As you can see, despite overclocking our HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo graphics card to 970/5864MHz, this did not provide any extra performance at 1920x1200 when testing with Aliens vs. Predator. Here an average of 48fps was achieved, making the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo just 4fps slower than the GeForce GTX 580.

When testing with Battlefield Bad Company 2 we were surprised to see an additional 6fps being rendered when comparing the new HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo to the standard Radeon HD 6970. An average of 77fps made the 6970 IceQ Turbo just 7fps slower than the GeForce GTX 580.

The HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo averaged 114fps when testing with Call of Duty Black Ops, making it 9fps faster than a standard Radeon HD 6970. This performance boost meant that it was just 6fps slower than the GeForce GTX 580.

The HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo was 6fps faster than the standard Radeon HD 6970 with 57fps, making it just 1fps slower than the GeForce GTX 580.

The HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo was 14fps faster than the standard Radeon HD 6970 when testing with Civilization V. This 21% performance boost meant that it was now just 6% slower than the GeForce GTX 570.

When testing with Dragon Age II the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo was 24% faster than a standard Radeon HD 6970 as it averaged an impressive 51fps, making it 6% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

The HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo was 8% faster than a standard Radeon HD 6970 when playing Dirt 2, as the average frame rate increased from 77fps to 83fps.

When testing with Metro 2033 we found that the overclocked HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo was just 4% faster than a standard Radeon HD 6970. With an average of 54fps the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo was now just 3fps slower than the GeForce GTX 580.

The overclocked HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo used slightly more power than a standard Radeon HD 6970, just 6 watts more to be precise, when under load.

The HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo operating temperatures were remarkable. While the standard Radeon HD 6970 reached 90 degrees when stress testing with Furmark, the 6970 IceQ Turbo maxed out at just 74 degrees.

The fact that the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo can operate at near silence even when overclocked (971/5864MHz) really is impressive. This makes it the perfect candidate to utilize Crossfire technology, as a pair of these graphics cards will not only maintain reasonable operating temperatures, but they will do so while making very little noise.

For the most part we saw excellent performance gains when overclocking the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo. From factory the card comes with a very mild overclock and we didn’t even bother to show you those results as they were at best just 1-2fps faster than a standard Radeon HD 6970.

Rather we skipped right to our own overclocking results, which sadly were not much more impressive than what we had previously achieved with cards using the AMD reference design. That said, again the key was the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo’s ability to overclock without making a racket.

-

-

Currently HIS are asking $370 US for the 6970 IceQ Turbo and at that price it is $20 US cheaper than the ASUS EAH6970 Direct CU II and MSI R6970 Lightning graphics cards, which are arguably even more extreme. In terms of value HIS likely has the better product, though if it is value you are after the Gigabyte GV-R697OC2-2GD is hard to pass up at just $355 US.

Perhaps the biggest complaint we have regarding the HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo is the fact that it was only released a few weeks ago, whereas competing products were available months in advance. That said, it is here now, and for those looking for a quiet high-end graphics card, this has to be it.