It appears that the much rumoured Radeon HD 6930 is the real deal, as at least one manufacturer has announced a card based on the budget high-end GPU from AMD. HIS has announced its version of the Radeon HD 6930 called the 6930 IceQ X and it appears to be identical to HIS' 6950 card with the same cooling in terms of overall design.The main difference is of course a lower shader count (or Stream Processors in AMD speak), although HIS doesn't specify the exact number, it is believed to be 1280, down from 1408 in the Radeon HD 6950. The 6930 also loses out on eight texture units compared to the 6950, but retains all of the ROPs. Unlike the Radeon HD 5830 which had a higher clock speed than the Radeon HD 5850, the 6930 is actually clocked marginally slower than the 6950 with the GPU core at 750MHz versus 800MHz. The memory is also clocked 200MHz slower at 4.8GHz (effectively) compared to 5GHz. AMD has apparently placed an upper clock limit for partner cards as well where the GPU cannot be pre-overclocked to anything higher than 790MHz, although the memory clock is allowed to go up to 5.1GHz (effectively).
There have been some questions as to where this card fits into AMD's line-up of cards and judging by some slides posted over at Expreview, AMD is targeting the Radeon HD 6930 as a more feature rich version of the Radeon HD 6870, going as far as stating that it gives Cayman level features at Barts level pricing. We have yet to see any pricing of Radeon HD 6930 cards, but as luck has it, Expreview did get their hands on a PowerColor card and ran it through some benchmarks at least. Compared to the Radeon HD 6950 we're looking at an average of about six percent slower with 3DMark 11 and Dirt 3 showing the biggest performance difference of close to 10 percent, with Left 4 Dead 2 showing the least at about 1.5 percent.
Compared to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560 Ti the difference is slightly higher at about seven percent advantage to Nvidia, or almost 10 percent on average with PhysX enabled. Here some benchmarks actually show a minor performance advantage for AMD when PhysX is disabled, but in the worst case scenarios such as Batman Arkham Asylum the 6930 is over 30 percent behind, or some 14fps. According to Expreview the PowerColor card they looked at is meant to be some 20 percent cheaper than an equivalent Radeon HD 6950, so if you must have a VLIW4 card with EQAA, dual BIOS and AMD PowerTune, but can't afford a Radeon HD 6950, then this might be what you've been waiting for. That said, we wouldn't bother with this card at all if you're looking at buying a new graphics card now, as AMD is coming out with the 7000-series shortly which is expected to deliver vastly superior performance, although once again the price is an unknown factor that might make this a good budget buy for gamers.Source: HIS, Expreview (in Chinese)

Read more: HIS announces the Radeon HD 6930, kits it out with IceQ X cooling by VR-Zone.com