14 DAY TRIAL // While some makers of graphics cards rely on the power of their brand and the pricing in their marketing strategy, MSI figured it would add a small bonus to its newly-released AMD-based video boards.
For those that are not up to speed, Advanced Micro Devices just launched its newest graphics adapters.
Said video boards are based on the Cayman graphics processing unit and are the most powerful Radeon HD 6000 cards released yet.
They are known as Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 and have already been customized by AMD's partners, such as Gigabyte and XFX, among others.
Now, Micro-Star International has added its name to the list of companies that have redesigned the boards according to their preference.
As such, MSI has prepared a pair of reference-clocked boards, only it added a bonus in the form of a key that unlocks the advanced version of 3D Mark 11.
Other than this bundle bonus, the specifications are identical to those that the Sunnyvale, California-based company chose.
Thus, the HD 6950 features 1,408 Stream processors, a GPU clock of 800 MHz and a memory clock of 5,000 MHz for the 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
The HD 6970 has the same amount of memory, only it operates at 5,500 MHz, while the GPU works at 880 MHz. The number of stream processors on this higher-grade model is 1,536.
It is interesting to note that MSI's two HD 6000 series video controllers were actually listed in France about a week ago.
The prices then given were of 398.22 Euro and 496.20 Euro, for the 6970 and 6950, respectively.
MSI's more recent announcement did not mention prices, but they should be lower now that competing products are actually on sale. What remains to be seen is how the two boards fare against the many competitors that have or are about to appear.