Asus are widely accepted as one of the top performers in the world of PC Hardware. They are currently one of only a handful of companies manufacturing 3 slot graphics adapters in both NVidia and AMD flavours.
The graphics card I will be testing is the ASUS HD6950 direct Cu II 2 Gigabyte.
Quote from the website "EAH6950 DCII/2DI4S/2GD5 ASUS HD 6950 Series graphics cards with dual-fan cooling performance. Speed up heat dissipation with 600% more airflow via exclusive DirectCU with dual fan design. Expand your visual horizon across six monitors with four native DisplayPort outputs. Super Alloy Power technology delivers 15% Performance boost, 2.5 longer lifespan, 35C cooler operation. Crank up 50% faster clock speed with exclusive Voltage Tweak"
The box comes adorned as is usual these days with something that appears to have fallen out of WOW. Why is a winged something or other on a battle steed with a whacking great sword going to entice me to buy this, is it likely to endow me with a whacking great sword? I think not, and besides I have trouble finding comfortable trousers as it is.
Also listed are the main selling points of the card, 810 Mhz overclock as standard, 2 Gigabytes of ram, super alloy power, Eyefinity multi display and of course the ubiquitous AMD Radeon Flash.
Opening the box you're presented with a the usual Asus black box with Asus emblazoned in gold, inside you find the wallet containing the CD's is on top pressed into the foam packaging but we don't need this as you're always going to get the most up to date drivers from the interwebnet.......aren't you????. The foam is in 2 parts lifting off the upper part reveals the card in it's anti-static bag and some accessories. These being Crossfire cable, DVI-HDMI convertor and a 6 Pin PCI-e power connector (The card actually requires 1x8 pin and 1x6 pin connector)
First thing you notice on removing this card from the packaging is that it's sheer size, it's not as long as a 6990 but the depth on the thing is borderline ridiculous.
Installation of a single card is simple enough although I would suggest some manner of support for the right and side of the card as it has a tendancy to droop.
My rig contains the HX750 Psu so fortunately I didn't need the molex to pci-e adapter, if anyone has a psu that doesn't come with PCI-e 8 pin power then be aware the cables aren't in the box.
The drivers unfortunately are where the wheels fall of on this particular card, or even range of cards as I've heard similar stories about the HD6970 and HD6990. They are so variable in both performance and stability that it took me a day of tweaking, discarding, rolling back, re-installing before I found a stable driver suite which would allow me to overclock to anything approaching a reasonable level. Bearing in mind that ASUS claims up to 50% faster clock speeds then that would be approaching 1200 Mhz, I didn't get past 900 so obviously this 50% claim is using some ethereal drivers, power solution or general ASUS genius which us mere mortals can't ever possibly hope to attain.
Anyway on to the testing.
Test Hardware consisted of
Asus Maximus Extreme-z z68 motherboard
Core i7 2600k with turbo @ 4.6 Ghz
16Gb Corsair Vengeance Ram 8-8-8-24 @ 1600Mhz
Kingston Hyper X 120Gb SSD
Corsair HX 750 Watt PSU
RSPC RASA 750 water cooling
Coolermaster HAF X Case
Test process will be 3D Mark Vantage runs for both P and X Scores. 3D Mark 11 runs for both P and X scores and a run of the Heaven benchmark.
"Gaming Framerates to be added"
Single Card Performance
My first test was a single HD 6950 running standard clocks and shaders (will talk more about shaders later) and the card produced the following results
Vantage
P Score 20257
GPU Score 22149
CPU Score 30776
X Score 9884
GPU 9544
CPU 30720
3D Mark 11
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
The above gives you an idea of the card stock from the manufacturer, although I will be running these card in Crossfire so all further testing is done with a pair of HD6950's.
There are pages and pages of information regarding the ability of the reference HD6950 being ulockable to 6970 performance, however this has been curtailed recently with the release of non reference hardware. Whilst it's not possible to unlock the HD6950 to HD6970 performance levels it is possible to unlock the shaders which are locked in the bios. The process isn't complex but this isn't a tutorial to unlock shaders so I will skim over it, needless to say I have tested with and without shaders unlocked to measure any perfomance increase available.
Crossfire with 1408 Standard shaders and standard clocks of 810 Mhz and 5000 Mhz
Vantage P 34460
Gpu 35768
Cpu 31052
X 18625
Gpu 18262
Cpu 29920
3D Mark 11 P 9642
X 3236
Heaven Av FPS 80.4
Score 2026
Min FPS 36.0
Max FPS 177.8
Crossfire with unlocked 1536 shaders and standard clocks.
Vantage P 35219
Gpu 36879
Cpu 31027
X 19693
Gpu 19319
Cpu 31177
3D Mark 11
Heaven
As you can see from the above the 3D Mark tests show a marked improvement but the heaven test shows hardly any movement at all. This would suggest that unlocking the shaders whilst gucci for your benchmarks, for actual gaming there is very little to be gained between locked and unlocked shaders.
Overclocking
I would love to say overclocking these cards is intuitive and easy, It's not it's far from either in fact. The included Asus Smartdoctor has voltage tweaks and core/memory tweaks, but you can't really use this standalone, in fact I would go so far as to say it's best to ignore the core/memory tweaks in Smartdoctor and use it for ramping up the voltage only. Sometimes it will apply the changes sometimes it returns with an x set to x with x offset which opening GPU-z roughly translated means I've altered absolutely cock all but this is a nice message to let you think I have.
In order to get anything approaching a decent overclock out of a pair of HD6950's I had to do immense amounts of tests, with lockups non starts, driver crashes it really was a complete nightmare. A complete nightmare which in the end didn't actually result in anything you could consider ground breaking.
The highest stable clocks I got were
Core 900 Mhz + 90 from stock
Mem 1350 Mhz + 100 from stock
I thought that this might see me achieve results akin to a pair of HD6970's or better the results are below.
Vantage P 36261
Gpu 38948
Cpu 30044
X 21266
Gpu 20635
Cpu 30410
3D Mark 11
Heaven
Conclusion.
A pair of these cards can give you performance which usually costs you >£600 for approx £440 so they should be considered with several key concerns.
Firstly you need the right case and motherboard to run these cards in crossfire, if you have the 2 cards sitting on top of each other (literally) then the upper card has little airflow and picks up all the radiated heat from the rear of the lower card, even with a fan blowing across from the right hand side of the case and from the front the upper card idled at 72 degrees when the lower one was sitting at 38 degrees.
Drivers the drivers really are shocking, it seems with every new iteration something is fixed with one hand and something else broken with the other.
Dimensions the weight of the cards is such that they can't self support and this is a problem as anyone who has ever owned an xbox 360 will testify. If these cards go through enough hot/cold cycles then the bend that the heatsink/fan is creating could cause the breakdown of electrical connections due to expansion/contraction. There is no requirement from ASUS to support the right hand side of this card so I shall wait and see if it actually occur's
The inclusion of a 6 Pin PCI-e power connector is frankly useless. If you're going to need to use that then you have probably got a PSU that needs upgrading and should really think of doing that before plugging the card in, but having provided that to assume that the end user will have an 8 pin PCI-e power connector seems a bit short sighted.
On the overclocking front the cards didn't do that well in crossfire, I am not sure if this is a driver limitation or a crossfire limitation but I had to add a considerable amount of voltage to get the cards stable at 900Mhz/1350Mhz. As a single card it's possible to put the clock above 1Ghz without anything like the voltage required above.
Anyway in terms of raw processing power these cards do perform and perform well giving a >10000 P score in 3D Mark 11 is not to be sniffed at, but I shall wait and see on the gaming performance which will be added later.
Cheers
Lee
Screenshots to come.
Gaming tests to come.
The graphics card I will be testing is the ASUS HD6950 direct Cu II 2 Gigabyte.
Quote from the website "EAH6950 DCII/2DI4S/2GD5 ASUS HD 6950 Series graphics cards with dual-fan cooling performance. Speed up heat dissipation with 600% more airflow via exclusive DirectCU with dual fan design. Expand your visual horizon across six monitors with four native DisplayPort outputs. Super Alloy Power technology delivers 15% Performance boost, 2.5 longer lifespan, 35C cooler operation. Crank up 50% faster clock speed with exclusive Voltage Tweak"
The box comes adorned as is usual these days with something that appears to have fallen out of WOW. Why is a winged something or other on a battle steed with a whacking great sword going to entice me to buy this, is it likely to endow me with a whacking great sword? I think not, and besides I have trouble finding comfortable trousers as it is.
Also listed are the main selling points of the card, 810 Mhz overclock as standard, 2 Gigabytes of ram, super alloy power, Eyefinity multi display and of course the ubiquitous AMD Radeon Flash.
Opening the box you're presented with a the usual Asus black box with Asus emblazoned in gold, inside you find the wallet containing the CD's is on top pressed into the foam packaging but we don't need this as you're always going to get the most up to date drivers from the interwebnet.......aren't you????. The foam is in 2 parts lifting off the upper part reveals the card in it's anti-static bag and some accessories. These being Crossfire cable, DVI-HDMI convertor and a 6 Pin PCI-e power connector (The card actually requires 1x8 pin and 1x6 pin connector)
First thing you notice on removing this card from the packaging is that it's sheer size, it's not as long as a 6990 but the depth on the thing is borderline ridiculous.
Installation of a single card is simple enough although I would suggest some manner of support for the right and side of the card as it has a tendancy to droop.
My rig contains the HX750 Psu so fortunately I didn't need the molex to pci-e adapter, if anyone has a psu that doesn't come with PCI-e 8 pin power then be aware the cables aren't in the box.
The drivers unfortunately are where the wheels fall of on this particular card, or even range of cards as I've heard similar stories about the HD6970 and HD6990. They are so variable in both performance and stability that it took me a day of tweaking, discarding, rolling back, re-installing before I found a stable driver suite which would allow me to overclock to anything approaching a reasonable level. Bearing in mind that ASUS claims up to 50% faster clock speeds then that would be approaching 1200 Mhz, I didn't get past 900 so obviously this 50% claim is using some ethereal drivers, power solution or general ASUS genius which us mere mortals can't ever possibly hope to attain.
Anyway on to the testing.
Test Hardware consisted of
Asus Maximus Extreme-z z68 motherboard
Core i7 2600k with turbo @ 4.6 Ghz
16Gb Corsair Vengeance Ram 8-8-8-24 @ 1600Mhz
Kingston Hyper X 120Gb SSD
Corsair HX 750 Watt PSU
RSPC RASA 750 water cooling
Coolermaster HAF X Case
Test process will be 3D Mark Vantage runs for both P and X Scores. 3D Mark 11 runs for both P and X scores and a run of the Heaven benchmark.
"Gaming Framerates to be added"
Single Card Performance
My first test was a single HD 6950 running standard clocks and shaders (will talk more about shaders later) and the card produced the following results
Vantage
P Score 20257
GPU Score 22149
CPU Score 30776
X Score 9884
GPU 9544
CPU 30720
3D Mark 11
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
The above gives you an idea of the card stock from the manufacturer, although I will be running these card in Crossfire so all further testing is done with a pair of HD6950's.
There are pages and pages of information regarding the ability of the reference HD6950 being ulockable to 6970 performance, however this has been curtailed recently with the release of non reference hardware. Whilst it's not possible to unlock the HD6950 to HD6970 performance levels it is possible to unlock the shaders which are locked in the bios. The process isn't complex but this isn't a tutorial to unlock shaders so I will skim over it, needless to say I have tested with and without shaders unlocked to measure any perfomance increase available.
Crossfire with 1408 Standard shaders and standard clocks of 810 Mhz and 5000 Mhz
Vantage P 34460
Gpu 35768
Cpu 31052
X 18625
Gpu 18262
Cpu 29920
3D Mark 11 P 9642
X 3236
Heaven Av FPS 80.4
Score 2026
Min FPS 36.0
Max FPS 177.8
Crossfire with unlocked 1536 shaders and standard clocks.
Vantage P 35219
Gpu 36879
Cpu 31027
X 19693
Gpu 19319
Cpu 31177
3D Mark 11
Heaven
As you can see from the above the 3D Mark tests show a marked improvement but the heaven test shows hardly any movement at all. This would suggest that unlocking the shaders whilst gucci for your benchmarks, for actual gaming there is very little to be gained between locked and unlocked shaders.
Overclocking
I would love to say overclocking these cards is intuitive and easy, It's not it's far from either in fact. The included Asus Smartdoctor has voltage tweaks and core/memory tweaks, but you can't really use this standalone, in fact I would go so far as to say it's best to ignore the core/memory tweaks in Smartdoctor and use it for ramping up the voltage only. Sometimes it will apply the changes sometimes it returns with an x set to x with x offset which opening GPU-z roughly translated means I've altered absolutely cock all but this is a nice message to let you think I have.
In order to get anything approaching a decent overclock out of a pair of HD6950's I had to do immense amounts of tests, with lockups non starts, driver crashes it really was a complete nightmare. A complete nightmare which in the end didn't actually result in anything you could consider ground breaking.
The highest stable clocks I got were
Core 900 Mhz + 90 from stock
Mem 1350 Mhz + 100 from stock
I thought that this might see me achieve results akin to a pair of HD6970's or better the results are below.
Vantage P 36261
Gpu 38948
Cpu 30044
X 21266
Gpu 20635
Cpu 30410
3D Mark 11
Heaven
Conclusion.
A pair of these cards can give you performance which usually costs you >£600 for approx £440 so they should be considered with several key concerns.
Firstly you need the right case and motherboard to run these cards in crossfire, if you have the 2 cards sitting on top of each other (literally) then the upper card has little airflow and picks up all the radiated heat from the rear of the lower card, even with a fan blowing across from the right hand side of the case and from the front the upper card idled at 72 degrees when the lower one was sitting at 38 degrees.
Drivers the drivers really are shocking, it seems with every new iteration something is fixed with one hand and something else broken with the other.
Dimensions the weight of the cards is such that they can't self support and this is a problem as anyone who has ever owned an xbox 360 will testify. If these cards go through enough hot/cold cycles then the bend that the heatsink/fan is creating could cause the breakdown of electrical connections due to expansion/contraction. There is no requirement from ASUS to support the right hand side of this card so I shall wait and see if it actually occur's
The inclusion of a 6 Pin PCI-e power connector is frankly useless. If you're going to need to use that then you have probably got a PSU that needs upgrading and should really think of doing that before plugging the card in, but having provided that to assume that the end user will have an 8 pin PCI-e power connector seems a bit short sighted.
On the overclocking front the cards didn't do that well in crossfire, I am not sure if this is a driver limitation or a crossfire limitation but I had to add a considerable amount of voltage to get the cards stable at 900Mhz/1350Mhz. As a single card it's possible to put the clock above 1Ghz without anything like the voltage required above.
Anyway in terms of raw processing power these cards do perform and perform well giving a >10000 P score in 3D Mark 11 is not to be sniffed at, but I shall wait and see on the gaming performance which will be added later.
Cheers
Lee
Screenshots to come.
Gaming tests to come.
