Diamond, Sapphire & XFX AMD Radeon HD 6870 Video Card Roundup

Retail Radeon HD 6870 Video Cards Arrive!

Today we have a nice little roundup for you on a set of retail boxed AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 video cards from Diamond Multimedia, Sapphire and XFX. Also known as “Barts XT,” the Radeon HD 6870 has already had a successful launch even though it has only been on the market less than two weeks. The AMD Radeon HD 6870 was launched with a suggested retail price of $240 and has been aimed at the ‘sweet spot’ for gamers.

The Radeon 6870 graphics card had 2.0 TFLOPs of compute power thanks to the 1120 stream
processors running at 900MHz and the 1GB GDDR5 memory running on a
256-bit bus at 1050MHz or 4.2Gbps. This makes the 40nm card slightly faster than the Radeon HD 5850 even though it has fewer stream processors and SIMD engines. We went into further detail on the architecture of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 in our launch article that you can go back and read, so we’ll skip that for now as the focus of this article is on actual retail cards from board partners.

The three cards we have here today are based off the AMD Radeon HD 6870 reference design, but as you can tell they all have different stickers on the front of them. The Diamond Multimedia Radeon HD 6870 XOC that we will be looking at today is the first factory overclocked 6870 that we have gotten our hands on. Rather than coming with factory clock speeds of 900MHz on the core and 1050MHz on the memory it comes at 940MHz and 1100MHz, respectively. It will be fun to see in the benchmarks how the overclock helps in gaming performance. Let’s take a closer look at the three video cards and then benchmark and overclock them!