MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1GD5 Power Edition/OC Review

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Bjorn3D put the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1GD5 Power Edition/OC against the HD 6950 2GB to see which matters more: 1GB of memory, or a higher clockspeed. A quote from the article:

When AMD launched the HD 6000 series graphic cards, they left a gap in its lineup. The Barts GPU core that gave us the HD 6850 and HD 6870 occupies the $150-$200 price range while the Cayman gave us the HD 6950 and HD 6970, occupying the $300-$350 range. Up till recently, AMD had no card at the $250 price range. However, NVIDIA revamped the Fermi architecture with the GeForce 500 series, and launched the GTX 560 Ti to fill that slot. To compete against NVIDIA at this price point, AMD sliced the memory on the HD 6950 in half and launched the 1GB HD 6950, keeping the rest of the architecture the same.

As a result, the 1GB version of the HD 6950 is virtually identical to the 2GB version, with the exception of the amount of memory. The card still carries the 1480 shader units, 88 texture units, and 32 ROPs. In fact, the reference 1GB card is also clocked at exactly the same speed as the 2GB card. So the question in everyone’s mind is, does the extra 1GB of memory matter? Or would the extra clockspeed on the card have more impact on the performance? We want to find out as well, so let’s dig in.

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