The Radeon HD 6950 often gets overlooked, because it falls into an in-between netherworld of pricing. Typical cards cost anywhere from $240-$300, but most seem to hover around the $270 mark. This MSI overclocked card, built using the company's Twin Frozr III dual-fan cooler, sits at around $280. So high-end buyers overlook this price category and budget buyers feel like it's a little too much.
One of the godfathers of PC gaming, AMD, sweetened the deal on some of its Radeon graphics cards by making an offer gamers couldn’t refuse: buy the card and get a digital copy of DiRT 3 for free. Unfortunately for AMD, rather than drumming up interest and shooting Radeon cards to the top of the sales charts, the offer turned into more of a “horse head in the bed” affair after hackers pilfered 3 million activation keys.
They say fate's a fickle mistress, but destiny's got nothing on the free market. For every Microsoft-esque success story, there's the burnt out husk of Sun Microsystems (R.I.P.). The really interesting tales have nothing to do with overwhelming successes or overwhelming failures, though; any budding novelist can tell you that a good story needs some tension.
OCZ left the system memory market to focus on solid state drives in part because it grew tired of razer thin profits in the struggling DRAM sector. Memory makers choosing to weather the profit drought would probably like it if more vendors packed their bags and left. Too bad for them, AMD has decided to crash the memory party, bringing the weight of its own brand name to the already highly competitive DDR3 memory market.
Remember the Radeon HD 5830? That videocard filled a certain price point, but it was actually the same GPU used in the high-end HD 5870, with a large chunk of the die disabled. Enter the Radeon HD 6790. At first blush, it’s similar in concept to the HD 5830. AMD took its Barts GPU (used in the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850) and disabled a big chunk of it. Voilà: the Radeon HD 6790.
AMD's 
PowerColor today said it "aims to blow gamers' minds" with its very first dual-GPU solution with AMD's Bart XT graphics engine, the PowerColor HD6870X2. As the name implies, this dual-GPU graphics card sports two 6870 graphics chips under its dual-fan cooling apparatus. That equates to 2,240 stream processing units and 4.03 teraFLOPS of computing power.
Popping up over the weekend is a somewhat blurry photo (cleaned up as best we could) of a completely naked dual-GPU prototype of AMD's Radeon HD 6870. The full frontal snapshot shows two Barts GPUs positioned in the middle of a long slab of PCB. Each GPU boasts 1,120 stream processors for a total of 2.240, and each with its own 1GB of GDDR5 memory, also visible in the picture.
Maybe Gigabyte got bit by the overclocking bug, or perhaps the top-tier motherboard and graphics card vendor got its mitts on some better silicon. Whatever the case may be, Gigabyte is getting ready to release a second, factory overclocked Radeon HD 6970 videocard, the GV-R6970OC2-2GD. This latest variant will ship with its GPU revved up to 920MHz, up from 880MH stock (and 900MHz for the R6970OC), while the 2GB of GDDR5 remains at 5500MHz.
AMD originally intended its Radeon HD 6750 and 6770 graphics cards for the OEM market, meaning they'd show up in pre-built systems from the likes of Dell, HP, and others. More recently, the chip maker confirmed these parts would also show up in the retail market, and it took all of 2 seconds for that to happen. MSI just announced three new videocards based on the HD 6700 architecture, including the R6770-MD1GD5, R6750-MD1GD5, and R6750-MD512D5.
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