Radeon HD 6950 CrossfireX review - Introduction

With the Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 uncovered and out in the open it became apparent that the Radeon HD 6950 is bit of a weird product to position. Basically its in its own class and segment.

Tagged with a price tag of roughly 269 EUR however this card could be a fantastic sweet spot for those that would like to pursue the CrossfireX way . See with two Cayman PRO GPUs on board you effectively can double up everything without being extremely CPU limited. Each Radeon HD 6950 graphics card has 1408 Shader Processors on-board, so for less than 550 EUR you could get a graphics solution with 2816 shader processors and two times 2 GB graphics memory partitions.

The theory is daunting and the concept interesting. Today's article will not only show you the CrossfireX performance of these two cards, but also will roughly reveal what AMDs to be released product under codename "Antilles" will bring to the market in terms of performance. Antilles will replace the Radeon HD 5970, a dual-GPU solutions merged into one graphics card.

And we have to tell you, where we are a little puzzled about the Radeon HD 6950 all by itself, but in CrossfireX this solutions seems to kick ass massively.

Joining us today in this article is a R6950 board from Gigabyte, this is a reference board with a Gigabyte sticker really. Since we do not continuously want to report about reference performance we decided to get the Gigabyte board as leading card in this review. So on the next page we'll chat a little about multi-GPU setups, we'll walk through the Gigabyte bundle and then head on over to check out variables like power consumptions, heat, noise and of course all game tests ... the results will not disappoint, no Sir.

Next page please, lets head onwards into the review.