14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that AMD's newest video cards are being promoted by its partners quite diligently, as even Club 3D has become a member of the company group offering 1GB versions of its high-end 6000 cards.
Not long ago, NVIDIA provided the industry with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti Fermi-based graphics adapter.
That was the first 500 series board aimed at the mainstream market and proved to be quite formidable in terms of performance.
This, of course, implied that AMD and its partners had to raise the stakes or at least meet the new ones.
What the Sunnyvale, California-based company did was unleash versions of its Radeon HD 6900 cards that have 1 GB instead of 2 GB of VRAM.
Among the companies that most recently did something of the sort was HIS, whose 1 GB HD 6950 came out just about a day ago.
Now, Club 3D has mirrored that move by unleashing its own 1 GB HD 6950, powered by the 40nm-based Cayman GPU (graphics processing unit).
The stock clocks are preserved, meaning that the GPU operates at 800 MHz while the 1 GB GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 5,000 MHz.
Like on all other models, 1,408 Stream Processors are present, along with a memory interface of 256 bits and multiple video ports.
Said outputs are dual-DVI, dual mini DisplayPorts and an HDMI, meaning that Eyefinity is fully supported. Needless to say, DirectX 11 and CrossFireX (for multi-GPU setups) are fully supported.
Finally, Club 3D implemented a dual-fan (80mm spinners) cooler with a large aluminum heatsink.
The company did not exactly give out pricing information, but a certain report claims that pre-order prices are of 229 Euro.
What remains to be seen, of course, is how this newcomer fares against not only NVIDIA's offer, but also the various competing cards that AMD's other partners have and will release.