As well as German forum Hardwareluxx.de and Chinese site Taubao.com leaking some images of the new AMD Radeon HD 6970, Russian site hw-lab.com also have provided some performance data on AMD's proposed GTX 580 rival.
Below you can see one of the leaked images (see source for more) of the PowerColor card:
Source: Hardwareluxx.de
There's nothing new here as we've already seen various leaks of the branded product itself, but if you haven't, this is what you should expect - a similar design to the 68xx series cards and an exhaust-style cooler. Expect 3rd parties to come up with different PCB and cooler designs however.
Source: Taubao.com
Here you can see leaked shots of the PCB from a teardown of the card. Note all the memory chips are located on one side, suggesting the use of 2 Gbit chips to make up the total 2 GB VRAM. There is also a switch visible next to the crossfire connectors. This is, apparently, to switch between BIOSes. That's right, a the 6970 will have a dual BIOS design! Otherwise, it looks quite similar to the HD 5870, along with a metal backplate.
On to perhaps the most important image, the performance in 3DMark 11:
Source: hw-lab.com
The result returned here puts the HD 6970 12% faster than the GTX 470, and trailing somewhat behind the GTX 570. This is somewhat of a surprise. AMD's Cayman cards have already been delayed once, rumoured to be down to last minute BIOS tweaks (to improve performance perhaps?) and component shortages. It was believed the HD 6970 would go toe to toe with Nvidia's fastest single card, the GTX 580. Retailers have suggested this, and the expected prices also suggest it is pitched at the same level.
Other sites such as Fudzilla, suggest that the card is slightly closer to the GTX 580, apparently based on their own data, and also claim that the GTX 580 wins out in most games (remembering that the synthetic benchmarks aren't always a good indicator of real world performance).
What does this mean? It's quite early to tell, but based on the available data, the card may well be a flop. If it is indeed priced at £400 and delivers sub GTX 570 performance, AMD have immediately priced themselves out of the market. However, it's early days. This data is by no means confirmed and there are no official drivers yet, so perhaps extreme driver immaturity or bias sources of data have created this impression.
UPDATE - Price now looks much more similar to the GTX 570!
With this in mind, I think it may be the case that the HD 6970 will sit between the GTX 570 and GTX 580 in terms of performance and price. Looks as though Nvidia will take the single-GPU crown this year!
With this in mind, I think it may be the case that the HD 6970 will sit between the GTX 570 and GTX 580 in terms of performance and price. Looks as though Nvidia will take the single-GPU crown this year!
The card is scheduled to land this week (Wednesday December 15th), so we shouldn't have long to find out. Vortez will be looking at the card ourselves, so stay tuned for reliable performance data and a review!
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