AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review

6800 Strategy, Pricing, and a peek at the 6900 series

As we mentioned, $179 for the Radeon HD 6850 and $239 for the Radeon HD 6870 are the suggested price points. While pricing is great we can’t help but mention the changes in the names. For the Radeon HD 3000, HD 4000, and HD 5000 series x800 meant it was the top of the line in single card performance. So AMD has changed it up this time around with x800 denoting the “sweet spot” in pricing, whereas Radeon HD 6900 will be the big dogs. Regardless of the naming convention, with the 6800 series you can now get comparable performance to the 5800 series for about $100 less.

You can see here what the new line up will look like. The Radeon HD 6950 is going to be similar to the Radeon HD 5850 in the line up, while Radeon HD 6970 would in the same position as the Radeon HD 5870 is today. The Radeon HD 6990 will be the flagship, replacing the Radeon HD 5970.

In this slide we see more of what this architecture has in store. This is AMD’s second generation DX11 design.

Fewer transistors means that power consumption has dropped as well. The Radeon HD 6870 idles at 19w compared to 27w of the HD 5870, while load power has dropped to 151W from 188W! The Radeon HD 6870 has compute power of 2 TFLOPS. As was mentioned there are fewer available Stream Processors. The Radeon HD 6870 with just 1120 compared to the Radeon HD 5870’s 1600. The Frame Buffer remains the same at 1GB of GDDR5 with a 256 bit width. Memory speed is down to 4.2 Gbps versus 4.8 Gbps of the HD 5870.Like we said, efficiency. The AMD Radeon HD 6870 has an MSRP of $239.

The Radeon HD 6850 follows along behind the Radeon HD 6870. Compute power is down to 1.5 TFLOPS which happened by cutting out 160 Stream Processors, leaving it with 960. Comparatively the Radeon HD 5850 had 1440 Stream Processors. The Frame Buffer continues to be 1GB of GDDR5 with a 256 bit width and an overall speed of 4 Gbps. Idle power is 19W while load power is just 127W! The Radeon HD 5850 idled at 27W and pulled 151W under load.The AMD Radeon HD 6850 has an MSRP of $179.

Let’s have a closer look at some of the features!