14 DAY TRIAL // The rumors regarding AMD’s plans to release a cheaper version of its Radeon HD 6950 graphics card turned out to be true as the company has just launched the HD 6930 in select markets, the first reviews of the card already making their way online.
At the heart of the Radeon HD 6930 stands the same Cayman GPU as the one used for the more powerful Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970, but this time it comes with just 1280 stream processors enabled.
The reduction is quite significant when compared with the 1536 stream processors found in the HD 6970, but it should allow AMD to reuse a part of its Cayman GPUs that failed to pass the tests required for them to be installed in HD 6970 or HD 6950 graphics cards.
The new stream processor count should be paired together with 80 texture units, 32 ROP units, and the same 256-bit wide memory interface, which can be connected to either 1GB or 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM (AIBs can choose how much memory they will include).
Together with the rest of the specs, the clock frequencies of the Cayman CE core utilized for the Radeon HD 6930 were also reduced as the GPU now works at 750MHz, while the memory is supposed to run at 1.2GHz (4800MHz data rate).
AMD will allow its partners to increase these slightly, up to 790MHz for the core and 1.25GHz for the memory.
As far as performance goes, Expreview’s tests seem to indicate that the card lags slightly behind Nvidia’s GTX 560 Ti, being on average 9.48% slower than its rival.
Pricing in China for the Powercolor Radeon HD 6970 2GB tested is set at 1,599 Yuan, which equals to about 194 EUR or $252 USD, while the 1GB version of the graphics card is set at 1,499 Yuan (181.7 EUR or $236 US).
These are expected to drop even further once suppliers clear their Radeon HD 6870 stocks, so the 2GB model should be priced at 1,499 Yuan or even lower.
Availability is still unknown, but it seems that only select markets will get the Radeon HD 6930, some rumors pointing out that these include just China and Russia.
