We have always liked this Turbo series from HIS. It is not our favorite series from the company, with us personally being a larger fan of the iCooler series, but more importantly their iCooler Turbo series which carries the benefits of an upgraded cooler and benefits of that pre-overclock. What the Turbo series offers us though, is quick to the market pre-overclocked cards, because as just the Turbo series and not those iCooler Turbo series, the model carries with it the reference cooler which ultimately means that all HIS need to do is find a stable clock speed. And from what we have seen in the past they are playing this game very fast, to get an Turbo version out as soon as allowed within their agreement. - TweakTown

HIS Radeon HD 6970 2GB Turbo Version Card Review

Aesthetically you are not seeing much that you haven't seen before. The board is pretty much identical to the default HIS Radeon HD 6970 with the only difference being the Turbo logo on their cooler. And a swing around the card also holds no surprises, a single 8-pin and 6-pin PCI Express power connector, two CrossFire slots, our dual BIOS switch and the same dual link DVI outputs, HDMI and two mini DisplayPort ports. Sure, there is no surprises on the exterior side of things, but it's just the internal side of things we are really interested in today and that of course means looking at the clock speeds that HIS are offering us.

As such HIS have bumped the core to a nice round 900MHz. As for the 2GB of GDDR5 memory, that's had a nice little bump 5600MHz effective. These are not huge overclocks, but they should be enough to help separate the HIS Radeon HD 6970 Turbo 2GB away from the standard reference clocked card. To be honest, it's not much of a surprise that this isn't a large overclock, as it seems without a voltage increase just over 900MHz seems to be the limit. We are not sure if AMD bumped the clocks last minute because of the GeForce GTX 500 series, or there was just never a whole lot of head room, but we will see what comes out.

While we don't have a price on these HIS Radeon HD 6970 Turbo yet, it is safe to assume going off past versions of the Turbo models including those Radeon HD 6800's, you're going to pay roughly $10 to $15 more for the overclock. For slightly more money you are getting slightly more performance. And if you do not want to overclock yourself and wouldn't mind getting an extra bit of grunt out of the card without having to do anything, the Turbo variant of these Radeon HD 6970 isn't a bad purchase. Overclocking for the most part without an voltage increase seems to be a bit more limited on the Radeon HD 6900 series.

This seems to be the main reason we are not only seeing few companies offer us overclocked ones, but also why companies that do offer us only a small bump. If you prefer to save some money and do the overclocking yourself, you've always got the option to buy this HIS Radeon HD 6970 and attack it yourself with some overclocking software. If you are not someone to overclock, and you rather feel more comfortable buying something that's pre-overclocked, the HIS Radeon HD 6970 Turbo 2GB is a nice little buy. While the best thing is that the premium for the pre-overclock is only minor, making it easy to justify the purchase.

If you were put in the position where you couldn't get just a reference video card, it's nice to know that you are not getting gouged in the pricing department for a card that carries with it a little overclock. It'll be no doubt interesting to see what happens when HIS start to introduce not just the Radeon HD 6900 series, but the Radeon HD 6800 series as those other series we love like the iCooler Turbo one.