Radeon HD 6970 sneaks in it under $150

AMD has another refresh to its graphics card portfolio this spring. Radeon HD 6970 is the new one, the card will be with more specifications, and the new mid-tier card will be retail at $149. The performance offers no threat to AMDs single-GPU flagship, but the 6970s 840MHz graphics and shader clocks speed plus 1 GB of GDDR5 running at an effective 4.2 GHz data rate dont seem like anything to sniff at either. Reviewers agreed that its AMDs slightly delayed answer to NVIDIAs GTX 460, and with latter card existing retail availability to make room for the less powerful GTX 550 Ti, the 800 stream processors and 16 ROPs does expose the HD6970 to being cannibalized by AMD s own Radeon HD 6850 and that turns out to be exactly what happens.