14 DAY TRIAL // Now that the Radeon HD 6900 graphics cards have been made official, it's time for manufacturers near and far to showcase their Cayman-based GPUs, Asus being the latest company to do just so with the factory overclocked ASUS HD6970 and HD6950 models.
Although both of these cards look pretty bland at first sight, Asus is one of the few companies that decided to overclock AMD's cards while also bringing some improvements to the standard cooling setup used for the HD 6900 series.
As a result, Asus states its solutions can offer “extra frames per second and no slow-down even during intense action sequences in games” as well as “better cooling and therefore enhanced output tolerances.”
However, taking a look at the clock speeds of its two Cayman-based cards makes us believe gaming performance won’t be very much improved by the insignificant 10MHz factory overclock achieved by Asus for both the HD 6970 and the HD 6950.
As far as the second part of Asus' claim is concerned, this is backed by the use of an all-aluminum cover instead of the regular plastic shroud, the company stating this dissipates surface heat more evenly and rapidly than the reference design.
Dubbed the EAH6970/2DI2S/2GD5, Asus' Radeon HD 6970 is powered by 1,536 stream processors, 96 texturing units and 32ROPs, its core being clocked at 890MHz while the memory chips run at the default 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective).
Additionally, the board features a 256-bit memory bus and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, the same memory configuration being used for its smaller sibling, the HD 6950, although the Cayman Pro core drops the number of stream processors and texturing units to 1,408 and 88, respectively.
The Asus EAH6950/2DI2S/2GD5 core is clocked at 810MHz and its video buffer runs at 1.25GHz (5.0GHz effective).
Compared to most other HD 6900 graphics cards available out there, Asus also bundles a custom overvoltage tool with both of these graphics cards, promising up to a 50% speed boost with proper cooling.
Unfortunately, no details about pricing are available right now.