Radeon HD 6950 & 6970 review

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AMD PowerTune performance difference

AMD PowerTune performance difference

We explained you that the new Catalyst driver in combination with Radeon HD 6900 cards allow for a programmable TDP. Now we advise you to leave things at default, but say you want to be less aggressive in the TDP and preserve power, what would happen if we place the PowerTune slider at -20% ? The same goes for unlocking the TDP and applying say +20%, we took a CPU and GPU, limited title to show you the differences, have a look at the two titles below:

Above the R6970 with Far Cry 2 - 8xAA and same HQ settings as before. With it's high framerates it's a good title to observe any performance differences.

Above Crysis Warhead, same settings as before, absolutely a GPU limited title. Again we see very same behavior...

As you can see a negative power draw at -20 has quite a significant impact on the performance, here you shave off say 30 Watts of your power budget. +20% (increasing that TDP) seems to do barely nothing, so yeah, leave the settings at default we advise, it certainly doesn't do much to gain extra performance. However it does prevent you from excessive power draw.

The PowerTune feature... on the consumer side of things it doesn't do any harm, nor it doesn't do any real good either. It's just there making sure the card doesn't pass a preferred TDP. It might in the future be a hinder to GPU Voltage tweaking though... that we still need to find out.

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