Conclusion
Noise / Temps - This is where these cards excel, on AUTO fan control they remain quiet and temperatures seem to remain well below 80c thanks to the vapour chamber. So good results from ATI here and the cards do not get scoulding hot either unlike older 5870 cards. Crank the fan up and the temps can be kept sub 50c.
Power Consumption - The 6970 can draw a maximum of 250W, but it typically won't see over 200W consumption and at idle consumes as little as 20W, the fact we could run a Crossfire overclocked system setup with ease of an OCZ 700W was excellent.
Price - Sub £250 for a 6950 and sub £300 for a 6970 make these cards very competively priced!
Performance - The 6950 is the star performer, it clocks well enough to get it past 6970 stock performance and a pair of these in Crossfire cost similar to a GTX 580, yet you get quite a lot more performance and hardly any extra power requirements. Which makes the 6950 ideal for those who want a great performing card and also for those who want some serious power. The 6970 can basically overclock further and has a few more shaders meaning it can practically match a stock GTX 580 when overclocked in certain benchmarks but still lags behind in others. But again its £100 cheaper and if you were to purchase a pair you have GTX 580 crushing performance. Neither of these cards can challenge the GTX 580 for outright power, but when overclocked they can come close, but they are considerably cheaper and the fact you can buy 2x 6950's for the price of one GTX 580 makes these mighty appealing.
Overclocking - Both cards did not support voltage tweak *YET* hence the best stable speeds I could reach was 930MHz Core and 5950MHz Memory on the 6950 and 980MHz Core and 6200MHz Memory on the 6870. I believe with voltage control we will see above 1000MHz and 6500MHz on the 6970's.
In Crossfire I could no longer use MSI Tweaker which meant I could only overclock the cards using the Overdrive in Catalyst which is why Crossfire overclock speeds are lower, so in Crossfire OC performance there is a lot more to come.
