PowerColor Challenges Asus Mars II with HD 6970 X2

Not contempt with AMD's own dual-GPU solution based on the Cayman XT core, PowerColor has developed a Radeon HD 6970 X2 solution of its own, which the company has created in order to challenge the supremacy of Asus' Mars II graphics card.

Just like its GTX 580 counterpart built by Asus, the card uses a custom PCB and cooling solution that occupies no less than three slots inside the system's case.

This is built around an aluminum heatsink that spans most of the PCB and uses two fans, one measuring 120mm in diameter and one 140mm, to dissipate the heat produced by the two cores while running.

As far as the PCB is concerned, this had to be re-engineered in order to improve the performance of the card and it uses two sets of 6+2 phase VRMs as well as no less than three 8-pin PCI Express connectors to deliver power to the two Cayman XT GPUs.

Unlike AMD's reference design, these are connected together by a LucidLogix bridge chip that gives each GPU 16 lanes worth of PCI Express bandwidth for increased performance.

The Lucid chip enables the two Cayman XT cores to work in CrossFireX mode or to use the Lucid Hydra Engine.

Configured in the latter mode, PowerColor's creation can work in tandem with any other (no matter the brand or model) graphics card found inside the system.

PowerColor hasn't made the stock frequencies of the Radeon HD 6970 X2 public, but this was designed to be clocked at least just as high as the single-GPU version of the card and to feature similar overclocking headroom.

Each one of the two Cayman XT cores packs 1536 stream processors, 96 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit memory interface that is connected to 2GB of video buffer. (via TechPowerUp)