| PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 22 May 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Page 15 of 17
Vortex II Edition OverclockingWith its enhanced power circuitry and excellent cooling, one would expect the PowerColor's Radeon HD6950 video card to overclock very well...and so it does. But please remember that nothing's ever guaranted with overclocking. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. Also remember that external factors, such as your system's power supply, can affect overclocking results as well. With these caveats out of the way, let's look at our results:
With 930MHz core clocks and 1370MHz memory clocks, we're a substantial 16% faster on the GPU and 10% faster on the memory clocks than a reference HD6950 (but remember this card comes pre-overclocked from the factory). These might not seem like much compared to the 40+% overclocks routinely seen on Sandy Bridge "K"-series CPUs, but they're excellent in graphics card terms, especially with only air cooling. I did have to keep the fans pegged at 100% speed to successfully complete benchmarking at these speeds, though. Here's a breakdown of the performance boost provided by this overclock at 1920x1200. Results are rounded to the nearest 0.1 FPS.
The 8.1% average improvement in performance closely matches the 9.4% increase in GPU clock speed over the 850MHz speed it normally runs at.
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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.