XFX HD6950 XXX Edition Review – dual fan overclocked

While we were disappointed with the somewhat lazy XFX HD6970 Black Edition release, the XFX HD6950 XXX has certainly ticked all the right boxes and restored our faith in XFX. For a start, they have included their proprietary two fan cooler which improves cooling performance dramatically … when gaming the core never got close to hitting 80c.

Other benefits of the enhanced cooler design include much reduced noise emissions and a quicker return to idle transient. Power consumption hasn't increased over the reference design either which is a plus point, these cards are efficient and won't cause a huge increase with the electricity bill, even if you game for many hours each day.

While the ‘out of the box' overclocks are relatively modest, the card does exhibit noticeable gains when directly compared to the reference design with many of the leading engines. We managed to push the performance further, reaching over 900mhz on the core and 1558mhz via the GDDR5 memory, this is significantly higher than any other HD6950 we have tested to date. The cooler is clearly a contributing factor and was one of the reasons we were so disappointed with the XFX HD6970 Black Edition – we don't want to see lackluster reference AMD coolers on any ‘Special Edition' cards.

We have yet to receive confirmed pricing information on this particular card, but we would expect only a small premium when priced against the reference edition. This is easily worth every penny and earns our highest award.

You can buy it from Scan for £206 inc vat.

KitGuru says: XFX have stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. A fantastic card and one of the finest HD6950's we have tested to date.

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