It's that time of year when the new toys come out before the Christmas rush. NVIDIA has delivered their new toys with the introduction of the GTX 580 and GTX 570 a scant week ago and now AMD and its partners are delivering theirs in the form of the HD 6970 and HD 6950. The HD 6900 series are part of AMD's Northern Islands lineup code named "Cayman". With this offering you have the Cayman XT part (the HD 6970) and the Cayman Pro in the HD 6950. Each of these cards are built using a new architecture that should drive performance and efficiency. With this introduction we have a replacement for the Cypress based HD 5800 series that broke open the DX 11 flood gates. These two offerings will be the new high-end GPUs for AMD with the HD 5970 still maintaining its spot at the top of the food chain for the red brand. Basic specifications for these offerings include 24 SIMD/1536 streaming processors, 96 texture units, 32 ROPs and 2GB of GDDR5 memory for the HD 6970 with the HD 6950 being a slightly cut down version with 22 SIMD/1408 streaming processors 88 texture units, 32 ROPs and also 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Clock speeds for these offerings come in at 880MHz/1375MHz for the HD 6970 and 800MHz/1200MHz for the HD 6950. I have a few offerings from Sapphire and XFX to look at today to see just how these offerings fall on to the performance ladder. Let's see how they perform in the only way possible and put them through their paces to see if they are a worthy successor to the AMD throne.