PowerColor HD 6950 PCS++ gamer experience like never before

Taipei, Taiwan –January 20, 2011–TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, announces a dual mode setting design in the HD6950 series: the PowerColor PCS++ HD6950. The PowerColor PCS++ HD6950 features a dual BIOS setting, allowing a bump in performance with factory overclocking to at 880MHz core speed and 1250MHz memory speed. The bump enables performance to increase out its own segment and maximize gaming experience like never before.

The PCS++ HD6950 also has embedded with a back up setting, easily delivering the extreme performance to tackle the game titles. Gamers can manually switch the different settings to meet their own demands.

“This product is like nothing else on the market with its dual mode setting design,” said Ted Chen, CEO of TUL Corporation. “The PCS++ HD6950 is an innovative product with all the key features, it should be the solution which can fulfill any gamer’s demand.”

Furthermore, the PowerColor PCS++ HD6950 features cooling through its dual 92mm fans, enlarging the air flow to lower the GPU temperature in a lower fan speed. Heat it dissipated through the heat from its copper base that fully covers the GPU efficiently. All this combined results in high performance in a quiet environment.

PowerColor's HD 6950 PCS++ is an interesting product creation. Even though it is marketed as a HD 6950 with official standard specifications, it will magically turn into an almost HD 6970 card at the flick of a button - a feature that PowerColor does not really advertise, probably for political reasons. "Almost" HD 6970, because the card will have the same shader count of 1536 as the HD 6970, but it will run at a lower memory clock speed. HD 6970 uses higher-grade memory chips which are officially qualified by AMD to be able to handle its 1375 MHz memory clock whereas the chips on the HD 6950 are not. The big surprise is that the memory on the HD 6950 PCS++ can actually handle much much higher clocks. We have seen 1600 MHz rock stable on our sample, which uses the same chips that many other cards, which can't reach those clocks - maybe PowerColor found some secret sauce that improves memory overclocking.

In terms of performance the HD 6950 PCS++ in HD 6950 mode does not bring any surprises, since it is running at HD 6950 reference specifications it performs just the same. Once unlocked to all-shaders performance mode the card gains 7% over the normal mode configuration, but is still trailing behind the regular HD 6970 by 3%, due to the lower memory clock.
Power consumption in "performance" mode is considerably reduced compared to the HD 6970 mainly thanks to the different memory chips, running at lower clock rate which results in a significant power difference. Unfortunately the card is still plagued by the same high Blu-ray playback power consumption that we have seen on all recent AMD cards, but this is not something PowerColor can address on their own. A PowerColor specific issue are the noise levels of the card, which do not seem to be optimized to the capabilities of the thermal solution. In idle the card is quite noisy. With 3D load added, fan speed barely changes - a clear sign that someone didn't choose the right settings for the BIOS.

Price-wise, a $15 price premium is asked for the HD 6950 PCS++ which is reasonable considering you get to keep full warranty, receive a guaranteed unlock and a free full version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. So basically, if you are lazy or feel that a manual BIOS flash, possibly with some BIOS editing is too complicated for you, then the PowerColor PCS++ HD 6950 is a great choice to gain some extra performance over a regular HD 6950. If you feel comfortable doing the flash yourself then a reference design HD 6950 would also be a viable choice.