XFX Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 GPU

[Edmund]

While AMD and NVIDIA just announced respectively their Radeon HD 6800 and GeForce GTX 580, the month of December should also be rich in novelties. Great revolution in the world of graphics cards ATI brand will disappear to make way for AMD. No panic Radeon are still in the game and the series of AMD Radeon HD 6900 brings crucial developments and innovations that will make your pleasure of endless gameplay.

The Radeon HD 6950 Eyefinity resume technology while improving, can now use up to 4 screens on one graphics card! Extend your vision in your favorite games and take advantage of a tactical advantage over your opponent. And if you're not Eyefinity player technology will allow you to rediscover still use you make of your computer. Watch a video while surfing on the internet without having to switch from one window to another, or increase your productivity by having several documents under the eyes simultaneously. The screen layout is easy with the Catalyst Control Center.

Fully compatible with DirectX 11 as the previous series, the graphics card AMD Radeon HD 6900 series have more of an improvement in the treatment of tessellation, which allows them to be more efficient while providing superior graphics rendering. With a dual tessellation engine changed, the Radeon HD 6900 series offers twice the performance than the previous generation in terms of geometric processing.

The computing power of the Radeon HD 6950 is also used for other activities as video games. Home Cinema for example, because the video acceleration engine AvivoHD you will read Blu-ray in optimal conditions. Thanks to technology HD3D you can even enjoy your blu-ray 3D. Finally the compatibility of the Radeon HD 6850 with HDMI 1.4a also ensures you enjoy an immersive sound environment thanks to compatibility standards Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio.

Features :

• Experience uncompromising graphics and blistering performance with a new and advanced architecture featuring full support for DirectX 11 and scalable geometry processing.
• Take supreme control of the action on up to six simultaneous displays with AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology.
• Supercharge your applications and experience unprecedented digital video quality with AMD EyeSpeed visual acceleration.

System Requirements :

• PCI Express based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 550 Watt or greater power supply with one 150W 8-pin PCI Express® power connector and one 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector recommended
• Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
• Minimum 1GB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive, a keyboard, a mouse, and a display
• DVD playback requires DVD drive and a DVD
• Blu-ray playback requires Blu-ray drive and a Blu-ray disc
• For an AMD CrossFireX system, a second AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series Graphics card, an AMD CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one AMD CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable is required
• Use of 3 or more displays with AMD Eyefinity technology requires a DisplayPort-capable panel or an AMD Eyefinity validated dongle.

Specifications :

The manufacturer has not changed the clock speeds of the two new products, thus running the Powercolor HD6970 (AX6970 2GBD5-2DH) with 880 MHz GPU clock speed and 2,750 MHz memory clock, the Powercolor HD6950 (AX6950 2GBD5-2DH) with 800 MHz GPU clock and 2500 MHz memory clock. Both models have two DVI ports, an HDMI port, and two mini-display port.

AMD has officially lifted the veil on the early models of HD 6900. The Radeon HD 6970 has a GPU from 1536 stream processors at 880 MHz, supported by 2 GB of GDDR5 memory at 5500 MHz and consumes less than 300 watts. The Radeon HD 6950, we find a GPU of 1408 stream processors at 800 MHz with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory at 5000 MHz and consuming less than 225 Watt per the connectivity, is essentially the same for both cards with support for DVI, HDMI 1.4, mini DisplayPort 1.2. The boards have Eyefinity technologies such as AMD, CrossFireX and AMD compatible HD3D. The Enhanced Anti-Aliasing Quality offers a new graphics rendering by altering new additions, dual BIOS management and PowerTune technology. Via PowerTune, the GPU is adjusted as required to maximize consumption. Unlike NVIDIA, all can be controlled by the user through the OverDrive utility for power control, plus or minus 20%. DirectX 11 compatible, the Radeon HD 6970 is announced at a price of 329 € and 269 € for the Radeon HD 6950.

As we know many GPUs share the same core, such as Radeon HD 5800 Series using the core Cypress, which had some units cleared in 2 of its lower-level models: Cypress LE (Radeon HD 5830), Cypress Pro (Radeon HD 5850), and Cypress XT (Radeon HD 5870), and the same is met in the current kernel and variants Cayman XT (Radeon HD 6970: 24 1536 SIMDs shaders ), and Cayman Pro (Radeon HD 6950: 22 1408 SIMDs shaders ), the latter being exactly the same as Cayman XT, differing only by having 2 other SIMD disabled by bios, and it is just allowing these VGAs can be flashed using the utility with bios ATI VGAs Winflash Radeon HD 6970 (remember to before backup the original bios), and start a new life as a brand-new Radeon HD 6970 thanks to softmod.

[Edmund]

Architecture

While on the Cayman only two single-GPU graphics cards: Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970. At the same time, we do not exclude the possibility of appearance of a third graphics card, with more modest performance and a more attractive price, as happened not so long ago with the Radeon HD 5830. In addition, in the first quarter of 2011 based on Cayman promises to be submitted to a dual-processor flagship, which will have to replace the Radeon HD 5970. Despite the fact that the new graphics processors Cayman relate to a series of HD 6xxx, architecturally different from making HD 68xx and, of course, from the HD 58xx. These differences are both quantitative and qualitative in nature, as an important step in developing new graphics architecture AMD.

The most noticeable and, in our view, significant change was the shift from five-way VLIW processor, which debuted back in the R600, a VLIW 4-way. Former five-way VLIW processor contains in itself, as the name implies, 5, computational units, four of whom were able to perform only simple operations such as addition and multiplication, while the fifth, in addition to these functions, performed even complex operation. These include such as sine, cosine, square root, etc. The new 4-way VLIW processor, the block for complex operations was abolished and its functions are now assigned to a pair of "simple" or "universal" blocks. Thus, each 4-way VLIW processor is still able to perform four simple or one complex operation that requires a majority of cases. Conditional loss in performance the old 5-way VLIW processor is possible only in rare and, so to speak, "engineered" when you want to simultaneously perform a difficult and more than two simple operations. In real applications, such cases are very rare, so you cannot take them into account, but free up and improve the efficiency of the drive unit to the overall growth performance of the new graphics processors at lower cost.

In addition, the new graphics processors increased the speed of the double-precision operations and optimized mechanism for sharing with system memory. Of the rest, no less important improvements Cayman, include increased productivity raster operation units (ROP) in a number of regimes, and of improving the traditional block tessellation, which, on the assertions of AMD, was significantly faster than its predecessor.

Unclocking

As often, all graphics cards in a range are based on the same chip, fabricated in an identical manner. At the end, depending on the quality of chips, or more often depending on the demand that these chips are being castrated for some of their components or to create these different frequency ranges. This is the case of the Radeon HD 6950 which are only 6970 on which part of the calculation units were deactivated.

The Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 are based on the chip declined in Cayman and Cayman Pro XT as the card. All diseases are, however, from the same production process. Only when mounted on the card that some choices are made. There are two ways to castrate a GPU. The first is purely hardware and no possibility of turning back: a link is physically destroyed in the chip. In this case, there is no turning back now. This is the technique to block Intel multiplier. However, AMD has already set their hardware with bridges on the packaging like on the Athlon XP. In this case, simply a "pencil mod" to remake the connection. The second way to curb a GPU is purely software and is done by the BIOS. When RivaTuner was still valid, and it allowed units to unlock disabled on many GPUs.

Whether such activation generally for any Radeon HD 6950 is possible, will be shown soon. The prerequisite for this is "put to sleep" that the disabled units on the GPU from AMD were irreversible. In the recent reference models seems actually only the BIOS the difference between HD 6950 and identify 6970th Thanks to the dual BIOS the HD-6900 Series Flash is the risk in the BIOS also low, as in failure nor the "replacement BIOS" can use one himself.

The risk of BIOS flash is on the new AMD graphics cards very low, since backup BIOS is installed, which can be activated by a switch if necessary. Meanwhile, models of AMD, HIS, Asus, PowerColor, Sapphire and XFX by BIOS update to a AMD Radeon HD 6970, with a success rate of 100 percent and no problems with the graphic display with full Shader count. TechPowerUp provides both the necessary BIOS versions and the flash software.

Converting AMD Radeon HD 6950 to HD 6970

If you have an AMD Radeon HD 6950 graphics card or are thinking of buying one very soon, you might be pleased to know, if you have not already, that the HD 6950 and HD 6970 cards from both AMD's new core feature and Cayman the first graphics cards to include in the configuration VLIW4 shader. Because of their similar make-up the BIOS of the 6950 HD can now be changed and the team over at Tech Power Up has been able to create a new BIOS that unlocks its full potential, basically turning into a true HD board 6970 graphics.

But before you jump in and start flashing the BIOS, be aware that the retail version of the HD 6970 card uses 8-pin and one 6-pin connector for its power source, while the HD 6950 has only a couple of 6 pin-assumptions that could cause problems if you are constantly running your zip HD 6950 to extreme loads.

Conclusion

AMD generally releases several models of their cards based on the same kernel which features a few cuts to fit each market range, this using two methods: the first requires international intervention in the nucleus that is often irreversible and second is just adjusting the BIOS to disable the stream processors, voltage and frequency. Apparently several Radeon HD 6950 (HIS, ASUS, and references) are blocked only by Bios, and can be fully unlocked a brand new Radeon HD 6970. In proved it empirically and show us how and release the results of the stream processors to an HD 6950 and even its frequency to a HD 6970.

Fortunately, AMD is not blocked by the stream processors are physically melts contacts, and a BIOS upgrade will add to 1408 are not available shaders and get the total number of 1536, as the HD 6970. Currently, it is absolutely possible on all cards HD 6950. But if something changes, you may need to select the appropriate instances.

In addition to the new, updated architecture, cards support the technology PowerTune, which provides more reasonable power consumption. New items are also supporting the new anti-aliasing Enhanced Quality AA, occupy two expansion slots are 256-bit memory interface, which amounts to 2 GB. Also not forgotten Supports CrossFireX and Eyefinity. On the cards are the ports dual-DVI, HDMI, and dual mini DisplayPort. In case of problems with the bios, we always recommend saving the original bios and if something goes wrong there's not much to worry as the Radeon HD 6900 have 2 bios, a recovery in the event of default and other problems.

Radeon HD 6950 has 1408 stream processors, 88 texture units, GPU and memory are 800 and 5000 MHz respectively, and the recommended price is $ 299. Radeon HD 6970 has 1536 stream processors, 96 texture units, GPU and memory is 880 and 5500 MHz respectively, and the recommended price is $ 369.