AMD Radeon HD 6870 And 6850: Is Barts A Step Forward?

[henydiah]

i want buy this card, i think good for CrossXfire may more Score

 

[cleeve]

Those not overclocked card are not THAT hard to get especially from a regular (not online ) shop .

I found the reference-clocked cards to be the minority. The last time I checked, out of the cheapest six GTX 460 1GB cards we could find, only two were clocked at reference.

We're not saying it's extremely difficult, we're saying that the majority of cards out there are factory overclocked.

 

[robochump]

Appears AMD is trying to make more money from re-badged or lightly tweaked 5000 Series cards and calling them 6000 series cards in the hopes that enthusiasts will buy them up. There is little excuse for marginal performance if any (5850 vs 6850) and charge top dollar for it (even if cheaper than rival still no excuse!)!

 

[robochump]

I am looking forward to a solid 6890 or wait until the 6900 series since the GTX 480 especially in SLI are power hogs! My electricity bill is witness to it 😛 Unless Nvidia's GTX 580 can seriously compete in the wattage wars with AMD I am switching to AMD.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

[citation][nom]robochump[/nom]I am looking forward to a solid 6890 or wait until the 6900 series since the GTX 480 especially in SLI are power hogs! My electricity bill is witness to it 😛 Unless Nvidia's GTX 580 can seriously compete in the wattage wars with AMD I am switching to AMD.[/citation]
Rumors suggest that the HD6970 will use an 8pin+6pin PCIe power layout, if that's any indication to you of the TDP. This means at the very least, over 230W. Although I have heard 255W repeated many times across the rumor mill.

 

[henydiah]

If 6970 is out may be won & fastes in the world , may be...???

 

[Vermil]

The No 1 question - that pops up in my mind, reading this article, completely overshadowing any grasp of whether these cards are fit for buying, or their reported performance or price, thus probably relating them to irrelevance for ever, in my mind, - is: When was this marketing person, who decided on these 68xx names, employed? And what did he/she do before that?
Where I come from, this action is called undermining a Brand name's worth.

 

[scarab187]

On an overclocking note, I have just finished installing my 6870 manufactured by Diamond and reached 990Mhz core(stable) and 1150Mhz on my memory(stable).
Tom's claim that a radeon 6870 cannot be more stubborn for oc'ers is misled.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]scarab187[/nom]On an overclocking note, I have just finished installing my 6870 manufactured by Diamond and reached 990Mhz core(stable) and 1150Mhz on my memory(stable).Tom's claim that a radeon 6870 cannot be more stubborn for oc'ers is misled.[/citation]

You gained a mere 90 MHz on the core. I don't think you've proved anything.

We won't really know until we can overvolt a 6870 but with no process improvement over the 5800 series the 6870 does not have the same overclocking prospects as, say, a 5850. The 6870 is probably much closer to it's max potential.

 

[kdmaris]

I just bought an msi gtx 470 "frozr" for 260 dollars.. are the numbers for the gtx 470 posted here for a reference card or?

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]kdmaris[/nom]are the numbers for the gtx 470 posted here for a reference card or?[/citation]

Yes, the GTX 470 results are from a reference-clocked card

 

[fspikec]

Typical AMD/ATI. Release cards with higher number (or iteration) with no performance gain or less performance overall.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

Interesting news for the upcoming GTX580...

"NVIDIA sacrificed the high-performance computing (HPC) functionality of Fermi to make the GeForce GTX 580 a smaller, more efficient card that's more suitable for the retail market. If the rumors are right, the card uses a 40nm GF110 GPU with 512 CUDA cores but has 300 million transistors less than the GeForce GTX 480 due to the canning of the HPC part. GPU clockspeed is said to be 775MHz, with 1544MHz shaders and 1536MB GDDR5 clocked at 4008MHz... The GeForce GTX 580 is expected to be announced somewhere next week, which is before the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 6900 series."

Looks like there could be some hardcore competition with the upcoming DX11 hardware revisions. It's unfortunate however that Nvidia decided to remove a lot of the GPGPU specific hardware in their gf110 revision. I know a lot of the people here would disagree with me, as many of you use your graphics cards strictly for gaming, but you have to understand that many people also use their GPU's outside of gaming, and a Fermi based Geforce is a much cheaper option for these tasks then a Fermi based Quadro.

So it looks like removing this 'compute beneficial' hardware does make it a more efficient gaming GPU, but of course it also makes it a less efficient GPGPU. We saw the first example of this scaling back of GPGPU functionality with the introduction of gf104. I know Nvidia's ultimate goal is a GPU that can excel at both gaming and GPGPU tasks efficiently, but I suppose there really wasn't enough time to do a thorough revision of the Fermi architecture to take another step in this direction. It's only been 7 months since the debut of the GTX400 series, so I'm guessing a sacrifice had to be made in favor of gaming efficiency in order to remain performance competitive with AMD's HD6900 series.

For more information you can read the complete leak below...

http://guru3d.com/news/geforce-gtx-580-might-sacrifice-hpc-functionality/

 

[tom thumb]

Just one thing to toss in here... The 6-screen eyefinity that is available on these cards is great, but I honestly doubt that a single 6850/70 could handle gaming at such a massive resolution. If not gaming, then what else can eyefinity be used for that 6 normally connected monitors cant? I suspect that the hard core eyefinity people will instead go for something in the 6900 range.

 

[kvarta]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/msi-radeon-6850-review/20

 

[epkfaile]

lol 69 😛

 

[Guest]

I like the commentaries on the pictures at AMD stereoscopic 3d
More comments like that cheer my whole day up! Kudos for that!

 

[Nexus52085]

Just bought mine. There is a certain site right now that starts with an "N" and ends with and "egg" and is having a 10% off sale right now, which brought my 179.99 6850 down to 162. I'd check it out if I were you guys. EMCZZYR24 is the promo code.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

Photos of the upcoming HD6970 based on the Cayman GPU have leaked online, check out the link below.

http://guru3d.com/news/amd-radeon-hd-6970-photos-surface/

It looks like a beast. These photos also confirm the rumors of the 8+6 pin power requirements of the HD6970, although we still have to wait and see if the TDP is actually ~255W like other rumors have suggested.

 

[tommywu54]

[citation][nom]Poisoner[/nom]I think AMD did a great job with these cards. Its just sick at what performance you can get for 200 bucks.[/citation]
Those kick-ass video cards are only for 2 kinds of people: first kinda people are rich business when they feel tired. they gotta play some FPS with 22'-24' monitor which require high quality graphics card to make it fully HD haha. the rest of those people who is willing to spend 200bucks on these cards are professional player.

 

[tommywu54]

http://icon.zol-img.com.cn/products/css/photo_show.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /

 

[Guest]

In reference to the chart on the conclusion page, how can a "minimum" be more than an "average" in the same test?

 

[jfem]

It's surprising to see the 6870 crossfire beat gtx 470 sli in average framerates knowing that sli should've better scaling plus the latter being the superior card.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]jfem[/nom]It's surprising to see the 6870 crossfire beat gtx 470 sli in average framerates knowing that sli should've better scaling plus the latter being the superior card.[/citation]

Not really, when you consider that the single card 6870 managed better minimum frame rates than the 470 across all game tests.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

"Even more impressive is the price reduction of the GeForce GTX 470, with at least one model reduced to $260 on Newegg—once again, even lower with rebates. AMD contends that these prices are temporary and will go back up after three weeks."

Well, it's been four weeks now, and the price of the GTX470 is still at $260. Yes, and many of the rebates are still available as well, dropping the price to ~$230-$240 for a stock card. So the GTX470 is pretty much considered an upper mid-range card now. It delivers absolutely amazing performance for the price, and strong competition for the $240 HD6870.