HIS HD6970 IceQ Turbo Fast but quiet gaming GFX card

Author: Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama Published: 27.06.2011 Manufacturer: HIS Product Group: Graphics cards In English Suomeksi

Power

One of the differences here is that the HD 6970 is the first card we've reviewed in quite a while to pack an eight pin power connector. With the PCI-e connector as well as the 6-pin auxiliary connectors providing maximum of 75 W each, the 150 W 8-pin connector comes handy. The suggested power supply sizes for these cards begin at 560 watts and once again I really hope people use proper power supplies with the necessary connectors rather than push their luck using an old unit and the supplied adapters.

Wide card

There are very rarely any problems with compatibility when talking about graphic cards, but the HD 6970 actually packs something noteworthy on this sector. First of all the cooler actually takes two slots, so overall the card takes three slots when installed. The second thing is the heatpipes that run across one of the Crossfire-connectors. If you're planning on Crossfiring more than two of these cards, make sure your motherboard can take the three slot coolers and also keep in mind that you'll need a very long Crossfire-bridge.

Cooler

The cooler is held in place with just four spring loaded screws. Now while the aluminum heatsink is surprisingly light, the massive fan shroud still adds such a long lever to any force I'd like to see the cooler attached with a couple more screws. Again as we haven't had the reference design around, it's impossible to really tell what kind of changes HIS has made in here, but atleast the Cayman XT core is still at the middle of the card, surrounded by eight H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C memory chips. Unlike on the HD 6950 Flex, these chips are actually rated at 3 GHz rather than 2,5.

Compared

In a side by side size comparison we can see that the PCB of the card isn't much longer than the one of the HD 5870 on the far left or HD 6950 in next to it, but due to the huge cooler it's still easily the largest card here. On the right are the HIS HD 6870 IceQ X TurboX and HD 6850 that will also be shown on the performance graphs.

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