The distinctive feature on the back of the card is the metal backplate for support and additional heat dissipation. The underlying heatsink is secured to the PCB by the X shaped bracket and 4 spring loaded screws. Removing the cooler requires the 10 screws at the back to be undone and two additional ones from the I/O plate. Removing the shroud and cooler is not covered by warranty so take great care if doing so.


The fan uses a finned blower design to push air towards the rear of the card, hence exhausting hot ait out of the case. GIGABYTE have stuck their own decal over the rotor for added visual appeal. The fan supports PWM functionality and can be controlled by users or temperature based profiles.


Unlike the HD6870, the HD6950 sports two CrossFire connectors on the side for up to 4 graphics card to be used in CrossFireX. The side profile of the shroud is dominated by the ribbed design. There are also vents above the CrossFire connectors where heat can be partially extracted from.


As seen before, AMD have implemented a new unique feature to their new series of graphics card in the form of the BIOS switch shown above. The '1' & '2' labels indicate that users can switch between two BIOS for safer end user update. Since the launch of the HD5870, it has been quite common to see users flash their graphics card to support voltage tweaking or to simply update the BIOS. AMD are ensuring that this process is safer by implementing a protected factory default setting, '2', and an unprotected BIOS, '1', which users can update. The switch is connected directly to the PCB, next to the CrossFire connectors. A phenomenon of this feature has been the growing popularity of unlocking HD6950s to fully fledged Cayman cores. The HD6970 cannot be unlocked further


Unlike the HD6950, the HD6970 has one 6 pin and one 8 pin PCIe power connectors, immediately suggesting high power draw. These are conveniently situated on the side rather than at the end to ensure that the cables do not get in the way of HDD cages or other components. Molex to 6/8pin converters have been provided for those power supplies lacking the required PCIe power cables. A minimum 600W power supply with 12V rail current rating of 42A is highly recommended.


The rear I/O panel has a wide selection of connectors, more so than on previous reference cards. On the right are two traditional Dual Link DVI-I connectors and for those still using VGA outputs, an adapter is provided. Furthermore, a single HDMI 1.4a port is built in and two mini DisplayPorts supporting the latest 1.2 standard. The ports are an example of AMD’s evolution on their display and video decoding features over the HD5XXX series. The main advantage of the new DisplayPort standard is the double bandwidth over the previous 1.1 ports, taking it from 10.8Gbps to 21.6Gbps. In real world applications, it means that a single port can support up to 2 2560x1600 monitors and 4 1920x1200 monitors through daisy chaining or by using an MST hub. The hub means that the card itself no longer has to sport up to 6 individual ports as was found on the Eyefinity6 special edition cards. As such, the two provided ports can easily drive 6 monitors at 1920x1200. If a hub isn’t available and daisy chaining not feasible, the 5 ports can still support up to 4 displays in Eyefinity as illustrated at the back of the box. The higher bandwidth of the DP is also relied on for AMD’s new 3D stereoscopy initiative. Unfortunately HIS do not provide adapters for the mini DisplayPorts. Small vents are also present from which heat is exhausted from.


Comparing the three reference designed HD69XX cards, we see very little difference apart from the livery on the shroud. All three cards are 27.4cm in length but have their power connectors conveniently placed on the side to ensure compatibility in most cases without conflicting with HDD bays. The main physical differences between the HD6950 and the HD6970 are the power connectors.