Sapphire Radeon HD 6950

Have you been wondering how the AMD Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" graphics cards are running under Linux? After all, Cayman is quite different from the rest of the Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Island" GPUs and its open-source Linux support came much later. There is no reason to wonder any longer as Sapphire has sent over their Radeon HD 6950 DIRT 3 Special Edition graphics card, which we have now put through our arsenal of tests under Ubuntu Linux.

Specifications:

- Radeon HD 6950 "Cayman" GPU
- 2048MB GDDR5 Video Memory
- 5000MHz Effective Memory Clock / 800MHz Core Clock
- Dual-Link DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort Outputs
- DIRT 3 Special Edition

Contents:

The Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 DIRT 3 Special Edition graphics card is just like Sapphire's other HD 6950 retail models and those from AMD's other AIB partners. The only real difference is that this special edition model includes a key-code to obtain the DIRT 3 game for free and a different heatsink cooler is utilized. DIRT 3 is a racing game that was just recently released for Microsoft Windows, so for Linux users this special edition model would not be worth the extra cost unless you are looking to try to get this game running under Wine. The cooler on this DIRT 3 model is also enhanced compared to the other models, but will likely not be taken full advantage of unless overclocking the graphics card and pushing it very hard, which is not done as much by Linux users.

Besides the DIRT 3 key, the Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 retail unit includes a CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA dongle, quick installation guide, two 4-pin molex to 6-pin PCI-E power adapters, and a 1.8 meter HDMI 1.4a cable. The software included on the driver CD is just the Windows Catalyst driver and Sapphire's TriXX utility, which is Windows-only software for overclocking and further tweaking the graphics card. Sapphire had sent over the HD 6950 DIRT 3 to Phoronix as a review sample.