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

Diamond Radeon HD 6870 XOC

Our friends at Diamond Multimedia sent over the Diamond Radeon 6870PE51GXOC, which is a factory overclocked card that is based on the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video card. This overclocked video card has a core clock of 940MHz and a memory clock of 1100MHz, which is a slight increase over the stock clocks of 900MHz core and 1050MHz memory. It will be interesting to see what a slight frequency boost will do in terms of gaming performance. Diamond Multimedia has a graphics card available with AMD reference designs available under part number 6870PE51G that sells for $249.99 on Newegg. The overclocked version we are looking at today can’t be found online yet, but we were told that is has an MSRP of $259.99.

The card that Diamond sent for testing was an early sample and they didn’t have the retail sticker available yet. They printed one up on a color printer and as you can tell it got scratched up a bit, but don’t worry the retail card that you buy will have a professionally printed glossy sticker on it. The AMD
Radeon HD 6870 PCB measures 10.5″ in length and since all of the retail cards we have today are based on the reference design the lengths are all the same. Diamond Multimedia places a two year warranty on their Radeon HD 6870.

The back of the Diamond Radeon HD 6870 XOC is identical to all the other Radeon HD 6870 video cards that we have seen since it is based off the AMD reference design.

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 has a pair of mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors
on it that have doubled the data-rate of DisplayPort 1.1. In addition to
the higher data-rate, DP 1.2 also brings support for higher resolution
support and support for stereoscopic 3D. The new HD 6800 series supports up to six DisplayPort displays by “daisy
chaining” them to two DisplayPort outputs. To the right of the pair of
mini-DisplayPort connectors is a full size HDMI 1.4a output for 3D video
(Blu-ray 3D) support and dual-link DVI-I and single-link DVI-I outputs. Diamond also left the display connections alone and went with the AMD back plate design and color scheme. The AMD Radeon HD 6870 has two 6-pin PCIe power connectors that are conveniently located along the top edge of
the video card. AMD says the Radeon HD 6870 also needs a 500W or greater
power supply for single card operation or a 600W or greater for those that want to purchase a pair of them and run a Multi-GPU
CrossFire setup.

The Diamond Radeon HD 6870 XOC bundle had a CrossFire interconnect or bridge for multi-GPU users, a manual/quick start guide and some ‘Stop’ sheets that had some important information on them. This is not the most extensive bundle by any means.

We took a peek at the software disk that comes in the Diamond Multimedia bundle and found it to include AMD Catalyst 10.10 drivers along some other files that were listed under the ‘Read Document’ tab.

When we clicked on the ‘Read Document’ tab we found Linux drivers, Adobe Acrobat Reader, a quick start guide and, of course, the user manual. It was interesting to see that Diamond included many of the text files in both English and French.