| PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Sunday, 22 May 2011 | |
|
Page 2 of 17
Closer Look: PowerColor PCS+ HD6950The PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II edition comes with a quick installation guide, a CD with drivers and copies of the manual in several languages, a CrossFireX bridge, a DVI-VGA adapter, and a mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable. The reference design Radeon HD6950 is a fairly boring-looking card: a large black rectangle whose only concession to visual interest is a red axial fan. The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD6950 Vortex II Edition, on the other hand, looks like a prop from a science fiction movie. 
With a bright red PCB, a black and red cooler, and four shiny heat pipes erupting from the top of the card, it certainly stands out visually. It's really too bad that much of this won't be visible even in a windowed case! The cooler uses four 8mm heat pipes to distribute the GPU's thermal load. 
The back of the card offers a clearer view of the four heat pipes. Until recently, cards with 2GB of memory would have memory chips mounted to the back of the board, but with modern high density memory, this isn't necessary.
The heat pipes branch out into an array of aluminum fins that cover the length of the card. Note the copper heat plate that contacts the GPU die. There is no direct contact with the memory chips, although the ones near the back of the card are directly under a fan. The memory chips at the top of the card are above the copper contact plate and won't receive much air. 
From the front of the cooling mechanism we can see the two 92mm fans that provide the cooling air. This is a common design for enhanced video card coolers, and while the dual fans provide a lot of airflow, they also blow a lot of hot air inside your case. You might be wondering what those extended triangular red fins on the fan shrouds are for...we'll get to that later.
The video outputs are the standard Radeon HD6950 fare: two DVI ports, a standard HDMI 1.4 connector, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors. The top DVI connector in this image is a single-link connector, something to be aware of should you be plugging this card into a 30" monitor. By using both mini-DisplayPort connectors, the HDMI connector, and one of the DVI connectors, you can run four monitors directly from this card.
Now let's take a look at some of the components on this card.
|
|
Comments
Are there still new Radeon HD6950 cards out there that will unlock? I recall reading somewhere that a newer upcoming design would prevent that.
We see a lot of reviews of these aftermarket OC editions on BMR.com (like the powercolor Vortex range and MSi with their Hawk and Lightning variants etc) But they are always pitted against the stock standard cards - or at best older and inferior cards in a crossfire/sli config.
This is useful of course, but the enthusiast in me would love to see a battle royale pitting the best OC variants from Powercolor, MSi, Gigabyte and co. 'Head to Head' to see who makes the best variant of the HD6950 &/or the GTX560ti
Just a thought :)
Also, as you perform your tests, have you experience any hangs or crash?
A friend of mine is serious about buying this PC6850 2gig Vortex 2 card
although he's not into researching much about it on the internet for its real potential, perhaps this might be a good time to ask you so
i could tell him about the settings you used so he could used it on his
when he bought the card. And, if possible if you have tested the card
set to a much higher settings than the one you posted (930mhz and 1370mhz on memory) could you post it here including the voltage settings
and the performance it gained in percentage based from the stock. Thanks and God bless!
I did not have any hangs or crashes with the overclocked settings I used as long as I kept the fans running full blast. If I left the fans on "Auto", the card would not complete most of the benchmarks when overclocked.
The overclock I achieved was exceptionally high for a 6950. I would not expect most examples to be able to overclock this well. Luck of the draw and all that.
The performance improvement using the overclocked settings is not only noted in each benchmark test, but summarized in a table at the end of the benchmarking section.