Below we have an overall look at the AMD Radeon HD 6950 reference model. It requires two six-pin auxiliary power connectors.

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Figure 1: AMD Radeon HD 6950

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 Figure 2: AMD Radeon HD 6950

This video card has two mini DisplayPort 1.2, one HDMI 1.4a connector, and two DVI-D connectors. The new DisplayPort 1.2 standard has a technique called multi-stream transport, which allows several video monitors to be installed using only one connector of the video card. Each mini DisplayPort 1.2 supports up to three video monitors (installed by either daisy-chaining the monitors or using a multi-stream transport hub), making this video card to be able to be connected up to six monitors using only two connectors.

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Figure 3: Video connectors

A new feature AMD is introducing with the Radeon HD 6900 series is the presence of two ROM chips, one of them being write-protected. So if you make a mistake while flashing the video card BIOS (a feature used by advanced users when they want to set a “permanent” overclocking), you will be able to switch back to the default (protected) BIOS by simply changing the position of a small switch (located near the CrossFireX connector), allowing you to fix the problem. Without this feature, a bad BIOS upgrade “kills” the video card.

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Figure 4: BIOS selection switch