Yes, after weeks of delay to ‘probably’ readjust the pricing, AMD has finally launched the replacement for the HD 5800 series. The new HD 6900 series offers improved power management and tessellation performance at a lower $369 price point, but also bitter because in terms of sheer firepower, the Radeon series doesn’t seem to have made quite the leap many of us had hoped for, which is to defeat the green camp’s monster that’s also overpriced.

The new top dog of AMD’s single-GPU pile, the HD 6970, offers 1,536 stream processors, an 880MHz core clock speed, and 2GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 5.5GHz for a total of 176GBps of memory bandwidth. It also comes with an MSRP of $369. There’s the slower twin too, the HD 6950, which comes with an MSRP at $299, but of course comes with a sacrifice of some clock speed (down to 800MHz) and processing units (1,408 in total). There’s a neat little addition to both new boards: a Dual-BIOS switch that will allow enthusiasts to unlock the extra performance headroom in their cards by overclocking them (not covered by warranty of course). The dual BIOS will allow you to have other ‘safe’ BIOS to switch back once things go wrong.

Reviews show that the Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 comes with a very sweet price-to-performance advantage, but the top dog HD 6970 seemed to be struggling with the arch-rival’s GTX 580. The HD 6950 is seen as the real value item here, however, particularly since it occupies a relatively unique spot in the price range, and most reviewers tipped it as their new bang-for-the-buck leader. There’s also the story of AMD abandoning 32NM due to TSMC cancelling 32NM production, making AMD to sacrifice some performance and new features on the Cayman cards to keep the die small. That says, we could expect the next HD 7000 series card from AMD which will be using 28NM (if nothing goes wrong) to have a great performance boost as well as some features that are missed out on the HD 6000 series.

Reviews:

• Anandtech
• [H]Hard-OCP
• Guru3D
• TechpowerUP