PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II Edition Pro Reviews

PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 2GB GDDR5 (Vortex II Edition) is a graphics card with one really efficient and stylish dual-fan cooling system. The Vortex II cooler has two moveable fans which can be moved away from the fins, they’re quiet even during intensive gaming, and the card is factory overclocked from reference 800MHz to 850MHz which gives extra performance punch on the card. The only downside to this dual slot cooler is that the card with two raised fans (Vortex position) will take up three slots. However, Vortex position results in only minimal cooling improvements over the default fans position (two slots) so the GPU will cooled just fine either way. The temperatures were around 78°C during gaming tasks, whereas idle mode resulted in temperatures around 37°C. The results show about 8% performance increase compared to reference HD 6950, but you can always overclock it further because this PowerColor card has a Vortex II cooler that lets you do it.

Overall, if you are looking for a new graphics card solution for your system, I would highly suggest that you check out the PowerColor HD6950 PCS+ and try and make room in your budget for it. Not only are you going to get a great looking card, but it is going to be able to give you the performance that you are most likely looking for. I most certainly will be using this graphics card in my main rig for gaming as it will be a nice upgrade for myself.

The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD6950 Vortex II Edition is an excellent card that would make any single-monitor gamer happy. Just watch out for that slot spacing.

In terms of performance, HD 6950 Vortex II sits about in the middle between HD 6950 and HD 6970 thanks to its increased clocks out of the box. This clock increase also results in higher power consumption than HD 6950 reference, but the increase is reasonable. Instead of the more expensive Volterra VRM, PowerColor has chosen to use the system by CHiL which works almost as good and offers software voltage control too, so overclocking enthusiasts will like this card too. Our sample would also let us mod its shader count to HD 6970 levels, whether this will be possible on final retails cards is probable but not guaranteed.