In mid-May, Yeston announced that it's working on developing a custom version of the Radeon HD 6950 graphics card that will feature a unique conch-like cooler, and now this solution has made its way into retail under the Game Master R6950 name.
The HD 6950 card features quite a colorful design and its most distinctive feature is the 110mm turbine fan housed inside a conch-like shroud which is said to optimize the airflow inside the card.Compared to the regular 80mm blower used by AMD, Yeston's fan features quite a few modifications, including a larger turbine engine and a redesigned axis, and its rotation speed has been set at 1800RPM.On the other end of the cooling solution stands a 65mm2 copper base plate which features five heat pipes to draw the heat away from the GPU and into an aluminum heatsink.According to Yeston, all these changes allowed the company to substantially reduce the noise and temperatures of the card and tests run by Expreview have revealed that the maximum temperature reached by the Game Master R6950 while running Furmark never exceeds 60 degrees Celsius.This performance is rather impressive considering that the card has its GPU running 50MHz higher than AMD's reference design (850MHz vs 800MHz).The clock speeds of the 2GB video memory have been left untouched (1.25GHz), but the card features a redesigned PCB with a much beefier PWM design.On the back of the graphics card, Yeston has placed two NEC-built decoupling capacitors, an aluminum backplate for added stiffness and users will also find two DIP switches that allow them to disable the card's over-current protection.Right now we don't know if the Game Master R6950 ever makes it outside of Asia, but the card is selling in China for 1999 Yuan, which translates into about $309 US.
