14 DAY TRIAL // Not so long ago AMD made official its plans regarding the launch of a 1GB version of the Radeon HD 6950 GPU, various manufacturers announcing solutions based on the new edition of the card, Sapphire being one of the first to deliver on that promise as Newegg has just received a stock of the company's Radeon HD 6950 1GB graphics card.
Just like the regular 2GB version of the HD 6950, the newcomer is based on the same cut-down Cayman core that features 1408 streaming processor units, 88 texturing units and a 256-bit wide memory interface.
The GPU and memory clocks have also remained unaltered compared to the regular edition, as the core runs at 800MHz and the 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer operates at a frequency of 1.25GHz (5.0GHz effective).
However, dropping 1GB of memory, allowed Sapphire to lower the price of its card to $259.99, according to its Newegg listing.
This makes it $40 cheaper than the regular 2GB version and about $20 lower than the soon to be officially released Nvidia GTX 560 Ti.
Compared to the midrange Radeon HD 6870, Sapphire's card is just $20 more expensive and should offer an important performance boost as the decreased video buffer shouldn't affect its speed, except when extreme resolutions with high FSAA settings are used.
Moving on to Sapphire's solution, this bears an eerie resemblance with the company's other HD 6950 design as it uses the same custom cooling system.
This is made up of four copper heatpipes that draws the heat away from the GPU into an aluminum heatsink cooled by an 80mm fan placed right in the middle of a plastic shroud.
Just like other Sapphire GPUs, the Radeon HD 6950 1GB (part name 100312-1GSR) comes bundled together with the TriXX hardware tuning application.
The 1GB version of the Radeon HD 6950 will go head to head with the soon to be released GTX 560 Ti, early benchmarks suggesting the 2GB edition to perform similarly to Nvidia's GPU.