The Radeon HD 6950 was a performance-segment graphics card by AMD, launched on December 14th, 2010. Built on the 40 nm process, and based on the Cayman graphics processor, in its Cayman PRO variant, the card supports DirectX 11.2. The Cayman graphics processor is a large chip with a die area of 389 mm² and 2,640 million transistors. Unlike the fully unlocked Radeon HD 6970, which uses the same GPU but has all 1536 shaders enabled, AMD has disabled some shading units on the Radeon HD 6950 to reach the product's target shader count. It features 1408 shading units, 88 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. AMD has paired 2,048 MB GDDR5 memory with the Radeon HD 6950, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 800 MHz, memory is running at 1250 MHz (5 Gbps effective).
Being a dual-slot card, the AMD Radeon HD 6950 draws power from 2x 6-pin power connectors, with power draw rated at 200 W maximum. Display outputs include: 2x DVI, 1x HDMI 1.4a, 2x mini-DisplayPort 1.2. Radeon HD 6950 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface. The card's dimensions are 286 mm x 126 mm x 42 mm, and it features a dual-slot cooling solution. Its price at launch was 299 US Dollars.