NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Versus AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB

AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB GPU Overclocking

To overclock the AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB graphics card, we used
the ATI
Overdrive utility that is part of the CATALYST Control Center. When you
‘unlock’ the ATI Overdrive, you can manually set the clock and memory
settings.

The AMD Radeon HD 6950 starts off life at 800MHz on the core and
1250MHz on the memory. We were able to max out AMD Overdrive at 840MHz
core and 1325MHz on the memory and didn’t see any issues in the games
with PowerTune left alone. This is a 40MHz overclock
on the core and a 75MHz boost on the 1GB worth of GDDR5 memory ICs. Not a
huge overclock by any means, but we expect to see a difference in the
benchmarks.

To test out the overclock we fired up 3DMark Vantage to see what this overclock was like.

The AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Video Card Stock 800MHz/1250MHz:

The AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Video Card Overclocked 840MHz/1325MHz:

Running 3DMark Vantage with the Extreme preset we got a
score of X10137 with the card at reference clock settings. The score
went up X10663 3DMarks when overclocked, which
was an improvement of 526 points or 5.2% with this mild overclock. Let’s see what it does in real games.

The jump from 800MHz to 840MHz on the AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB video card’s core clock
helped boost performance by 4.7% in AvP at a resolution of 1920×1200. This overclock is only an increase of 5% on the core clock, so this overclock was expected.