Gadgetory

today we're going to be unboxing the all-new Radeon HD 6950 so this is the latest addition to the 6000 series of graphics cards from AMD just like the 68 70 and the 68 50 which were released a little while ago the 69 70 and the 69 50 have a very very similar feature set to those cards but as you might imagine because of the higher number they have more performance more more overall muscle so let's go ahead and start opening the box because that's what I do on this channel tonight open this up so this is a DirectX 11 graphics card as you might expect it has full support for AMD Eyefinity technology with up to 4 displays so that is one of the features that it does have in common with its little brother the 6850 and here's something that I also wanted to mention about this part so Andy's numbering scheme has changed I did mention higher numbers are better and that is generally true however when they switched from the 5000 series to the 6000 series the 5870 was actually not meant to be replaced by the 6870 the 5870 was replaced by the 6970 now and the 6870 replaced the old 5770 in terms of where they fall in the overall pricing stack okay so this 6950 should be compared as like an evolutionary next step to the last generations 5850 that's what we're comparing it to so compared to the 5850 we've added much beefier tessellation performance we've added hdmi 1.4 8 we've added Eyefinity support for up to 4 monitors instead of only 3 and we have also added more performance and more ram so this is a 2 gigabyte graphics card compared to the one gig that was 2 on 58 50s and 5870 see I'm totally going to get my signals crossed on all of these numbering schemes okay let me just see if there's anything else that I need to mention oh yeah we've got support for AMD HD 3d technology which means you can play 3d games 3d blu-rays we have a driver CD which you should throw away as well as an installation guide for how to install your graphics card we have full support for 7.1 Audio with the built-in HDMI port as well as full support for AMD crossfire X technology so that is three way or two way on this particular card and I guess I better get that sorry about that guys alright let's have a look at what we've got in terms of accessories not a whole lot actually this is a fairly bare-bones package but I've got no problem with that personally ah ok so here we've got a crossfire bridge which is expected and then we have a DVI to VGA adapter although if you're really still using a VGA monitor or a VGA cable and you're buying a $300 graphics card you might want to rethink your priorities and then next we've got a mini DisplayPort to display port adapter this one's pretty useful because not too many people out there are using mini DisplayPort monitors or many DisplayPort cables so as long as you buy a DP monitor if it comes with a cable you will be able to connect your graphics card because this particular card does not have even a single standard DisplayPort connector it relies on mini DisplayPort to get basically to squeeze some extra space onto the back i/o shield so that you can plug in up to 4 displays all right so here's the card itself the Radeon 69 50 I love power colours graphics actually they've got like just kind of a badass like robot Knight like futuristic glowing eye dude he has like wings and he has like a huge sword that's uh I mean if you actually kind of extend it from where it's cut off by the fan it probably ends about here so it's like taller than he is and he looks pretty tall so yeah most people don't care about the graphics I do whatever all right we've got a power color sticker here and then we've got pretty much the same fan we've seen AMD using for the last little while on their high-end graphics cards let's move around to the top and then on the top of the card we've got our power plug so we have dual 6 pin PCI Express and one of the things I noticed about this card is it's one of the first I've ever seen that doesn't come with molex to PCIe connectors so make sure you have a power supply with two PCI Express 6 pin connectors and actually why don't we have a quick look at the side of the box and see what 12 volt rail amperage they recommend 500 water greater power supply with two 6-pin PCI AM okay they don't say anything about 12 volt rail okay so also on the top of the card we have a couple of other things we have the crossfire connectors that is for two-way or 3-way crossfire and then we have a little dip switch here that is for flashing the BIOS on this particular graphics card some of the exhaust is actually done right here at the top and then you can clearly see down there the vapor chamber cooler that it that this card comes equipped with just like the 69 70 it's big brother so speaking of its big brother the actual difference between the 68 50 69 50 and the 69 70 is that it has fewer functional units they both have the same amount of RAM and is also clocked a little bit lower it also consumes less power and it is cheaper so it's a slightly cut-down 69 70 here on the back we find that same red and black pattern that we recognize from the 68 70 and the 68 50 as well as its Big Brother on the bottom we find a standard PCI Express 2.0 slot and lots of interesting stickers with serial numbers and whatnot on the back and I love this i gushed about it in my 69 70 unboxing already so I'm not going to do it too much on this one but I love the the heat spreader on the back it's awesome makes the card look really really sharp and I mean even if you install a water block or like an aftermarket cooler most of them support keeping the backplate on so it really makes the whole thing look really nice so on the back of the card we're going to find all of our inputs and outputs and no inputs really mostly output and we will find out what they are so first of all we have an air output exhaust that is so this card is kind of half and half external exhaust and internal exhaust and then we've also got two DVI connectors one HDMI and two de mini DisplayPort adapt connectors not adapters so when you're running four monitors you're going to want to plug in either two DVI and two mini DisplayPort or one DVI one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort you can't use all three of these and one DisplayPort likewise if you're running three monitors you can't just use these three you have to use two of these three and then one of these two four triple monitor support so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Radeon HD 6950 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for on boxing's reviews and other great computer videos featuring me