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AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 7:59 pm
by Apoptosis
AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Today AMD released their second generation DirectX 11 video card with the Radeon HD 6800 series. The Radeon HD 6800 series consists of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards and we have an in-depth review of them for you today. We also run them both in CrossFire to see how they scale and do all the usual tests that we throw at new video cards!
The AMD Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 proved to be two very solid performing mainstream video cards from what we saw in our initial testing with them. These cards are officially AMD's second generation DirectX 11 video card series, which is impressive as NVIDIA still has not released all of their first generation cards yet. When AMD designed the Radeon HD 6800 'Barts' series of GPUs they wanted to have Radeon HD 5800-class performance, but optimize the GPU to lower power use and the price tag. The cards do in fact have Radeon HD 5800-class performance in general and we saw much better power efficiency from the cards. This was done by lower the transistor count from 2.15 billion to 1.7 billion and as a result the die size went from 334mm2 to just 255mm2. Since both the Radeon HD 5800 and 6800 series are built by TSMC on the 40nm process we can see that AMD really cleaned things up inside the core and tuned this GPU for efficiency.
Article Title: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Article URL: http://legitreviews.com/article/1445/1/
DIGG URL: http://digg.com/story/r/amd_releases_2n ... ideo_cards
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 8:46 pm
by geokilla
FIRST!
Anyways I read your review here and it seems that over here, NVIDIA GTX 460 seem to outperform the AMD 6800 series whereas over at HWC, it's the other way around. I'm curious as to why it's like that. Yes the testing methodology is different, but could there be another reason behind it?
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 8:54 pm
by Apoptosis
geokilla wrote:FIRST!
Anyways I read your review here and it seems that over here, NVIDIA GTX 460 seem to outperform the AMD 6800 series whereas over at HWC, it's the other way around. I'm curious as to why it's like that. Yes the testing methodology is different, but could there be another reason behind it?
Might be due to core clocks as both of our GTX 460's that we have are overclocked...
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB FTW - 850MHz Core/1700MHz Shader/1000MHz Memory
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB SuperClocked - 763MHz Core/1526MHz Shader/950MHz Memory
I just checked and they were using reference clocked cards, so that might be part of it.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 9:19 pm
by geokilla
Apoptosis wrote:geokilla wrote:FIRST!
Anyways I read your review here and it seems that over here, NVIDIA GTX 460 seem to outperform the AMD 6800 series whereas over at HWC, it's the other way around. I'm curious as to why it's like that. Yes the testing methodology is different, but could there be another reason behind it?
Might be due to core clocks as both of our GTX 460's that we have are overclocked...
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB FTW - 850MHz Core/1700MHz Shader/1000MHz Memory
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB SuperClocked - 763MHz Core/1526MHz Shader/950MHz Memory
I just checked and they were using reference clocked cards, so that might be part of it.
Yep. A HWC member pointed that out. I totally forgot that the GTX 460 are insane overclockers.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 9:21 pm
by Apoptosis
yeah and the EVGA 01G-P3-1377-TR GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) FTW 1GB card I am running retails right now for
$219 after rebate, so it is price competitive with the Radeon HD 6870. I almost down clocked it till i saw the price on it.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:10 pm
by Sttm
Great review as always.
I am kind of disappointed with the performance of the 6870 compared to the overclocked 460s; and I have this (maybe wrong) idea that the 460s in SLI would scale better then the 6870 as well. It seems more of a catch up product then the leap ahead I was hoping for.
How long before 6970, 6990 do you think?
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 1:33 am
by lordvic
Nice! Was checking every couple hours wating for this review! Thank you thank you!
From the looks of it, the 6850 looks like a solid card; the 6870 is pretty good too not gonna lie. XFX has a a custom version already..wow..very noticeable dfferences compared to the reference design.
Solid price point for these cards too! Deciding to either get two 6850's or a single 6900 card....
By the way, any set date or month for the 6900 series yet?
EDIT: Looking a NewEgg I see GIGABYTE also has a 6850 with a custom design...two 80mm fans + heatpipes it seems.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 6:26 am
by JGarcia
A few questions from a GPU noob.
1. Would these cards crossfire with my 5770?
2. Or should i just buy another 5770
3. Should i just hold off till the 6900 series?
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 6:58 am
by Apoptosis
JGarcia wrote:A few questions from a GPU noob.
1. Would these cards crossfire with my 5770?
2. Or should i just buy another 5770
3. Should i just hold off till the 6900 series?
1) No
2) If the price is right... Keep an eye out for a used 5770 for cheap as that is always cost effective.
3) Remember the 6900 series will cost more... It will likely be $299-$599 I would guess, but you got the 6950, 6970, 6990.
lordvic wrote:By the way, any set date or month for the 6900 series yet?
I would say at least a month from today as I don't see a point to do a release sooner than that. NVIDIA is also rushing their GTX580 card out the door, so expect that to be out by Christmas. We are hearing rumors that all the CUDA cores are being enabled now and that they cleaned up the original GF100 design by re-taping it and cleaning up the design a bit.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:25 am
by Major_A
These are nice cards no doubt. I do hate the new naming scheme. It's like they polled people walking out the door at Best Buy or Frys and asked why they bought the HD 4850 over the HD 5770. "Uh, the 8 in the name means it's better, duh."
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:08 pm
by Sttm
Yeah I almost think they should start naming them like cars. With a year number, then a series letter to designate the speed. Like 2011 Radeon A Series.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 5:26 pm
by Athlonite
Gigabyte GV-R685D5-1GD Radeon HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 Windforce Dual Fan Design $389.85 NZD
Gigabyte GV-R687D5-1GD-B Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 Dual Display Port $458.85 NZD
for that sort of money to performance ratio I'm better off buying another 5770 and going CF
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2010 3:09 am
by INeedAFnSuffix
As usual , i would have to wait ages for it to come out in singapore ,
hopefully sapphire will be the cheapest here .
( And XFX has the most expensive cards after asus (LOL) )
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2010 2:54 am
by stickytape
What's the difference between the AMD 6870 and the Sapphire 6870?
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2010 7:15 am
by Apoptosis
a different sticker and they Sapphire card has a BIOS on it that has higher clocks as it is factory overclocked... Everything else is the same. You'll see a review on some 6870's this week.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 1:24 am
by Just4funUK
One thing I couldn't help notice with the AMD HD6800 series review Legit Reviews did there was no GTX 460 SLI scores on the charts. Only the GTS 450 SLI scores. Any explaination why these were missed.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1445/1/
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2010 10:56 am
by INeedAFnSuffix
Alright , the 6870 and 50 is available here in SG already .
280 + for the 6850 and 300+ but not 400+ for the 6870 .
Nice pricing .
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2010 11:03 am
by Apoptosis
Just4funUK wrote:One thing I couldn't help notice with the AMD HD6800 series review Legit Reviews did there was no GTX 460 SLI scores on the charts. Only the GTS 450 SLI scores. Any explaination why these were missed.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1445/1/
not missed... more a time issue... With the GTX580 launch this week and a million other things it's all a rush to get launches out... you'd be surprised how many reviews we have in the works at any one time. Right now the number is nearly 40 among a dozen writers... I think the mix of games and cards that we review is superior to 95% of the other reviews out there.
Re: AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2011 7:02 am
by dozenkai
bought myself 2 XFX6870, can t wait to see it work for 150,= euros each(approx $216,=).
the price dropped 200,= euros for the pair in 6 months, a steal!