| PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 22 May 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Page 7 of 17
DX10: 3DMark VantageEvery few years, FutureMark updates their video card benchmark suites, but the older versions remain relevant for years after they've been superseded. 3DMark Vantage is a good example: it's an excellent test for DX10 support, and still can strain the burliest graphics cards with its two GPU-specific tests. Benchmark Reviews runs the Jane Nash and New Calico tests to stress our test cards. For this review I set the 3DMark Vantage settings to high quality, with 8x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. Of the two GPU tests 3DMark Vantage offers, the Jane Nash performance benchmark is slightly less demanding. In a short video scene the special agent escapes a secret lair by water, nearly losing her shirt in the process. Let's look at the results: 
The Radeon 5770 was a good card in its day (and still can be in a CrossFireX setup), but it's outclassed here. The 6950 stock results eclipse those of every other card here except the NVIDIA GTX570, which is 0.5 to 1.4 fps faster. Even then, the overclocked 6950 is the fastest card in both tests. The New Calico test is more intensive, with a giant carrier spaceship sending a fleet of smaller bombers through a tumbling asteroid field with hundreds of spinning space rocks. The camera swoops among the asteroids as it follows the bombers through the field for a clear shot of the doomed planet below. Changing light sources and lens flares, as well as a fly-through of the carrier, add to the complexity of the test. 
The GTX570 takes the win in the New Calico test, followed closely by the overclocked 6950, the GTX560, and the stock-clocked 6950. The 5770 and 6850 trail far behind.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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.