Sapphire Radeon HD6850 and HD6870 Review

1. Introduction2. The Architecture3. The Sapphire HD6870 and HD68504. Testing Methodology5. Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. 3D Mark Vantage7. Alien V Predator8. Far Cry 29. Lost Planet 210. Mafia 211. Metro 203312. Resident Evil 513. Tom Clancy HAWX14. Distributed Computing (RC5-72)15. TessMark16. Shader Toy17. HQV Benchmark 2.018. Power Consumption19. Thermal Dynamics20. Acoustics Performance21. Overclocking the Sapphire HD687022. Overclocking the Sapphire HD685023. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

KitGuru is old in the tooth and likes naming conventions which don't change. With the launch of the Radeon HD 6000 series, AMD has altered its naming strategy. The high end cards will now be the 6900 series (due November) and the 6800 cards that we're looking at today, will actually be sold for less than £200 each, including VAT (we're guessing that's under $250 for our American readers). How much can any gamer get from a graphic card that costs so little?

It seems like only yesterday that nVidia released its first Fermi products to a universally lukewarm reception. Against the subsequent series of lacklustre launches that followed, the GTX460 stood out like a giant. A genuine classic card by anyone's standard. High performance, competitive pricing and an overclocking potential that made everything around it pale in comparison. AMD has finally moved to try and counter this threat with the Radeon HD 6800 series cards.

Before we get into the details of precisely which cards have been tested, we also want to highlight how difficult our final evaluation has been made by the huge price changes we've seen over the past 5 days. Cards like EVGA's GTX460 FTW have dropped from £205 to £175, ahead of the Radeon HD 6800 series launch. In turn, it seems that AMD had some last minute price moves up its corporate sleeve. Tricky, but we've rolled with it – testing first and then making the value decisions right at the end – once we knew precisely what the final pricing will be.

Today we are looking at two boards from AMD's biggest partner – Sapphire. We will be getting up close and personal with both their HD6870 and HD6850 products, seeing how they can hold up against the mighty GTX460 in various flavours.

Firstly we need to address the naming conventions, because many people are already scratching their heads in bewilderment. The HD6870, for instance, isn't a direct replacement for the HD5870 – AMD's goal was to deliver similar levels of performance from the HD6870 but at a much lower price.

The HD5870 first hit the market at £350, while the HD6870 will cost less than £195 … an incredible achievement if the new AMD hardware can go head to head with the giant killing GTX460 – the source of this pricing war.

The ‘Barts' codenamed products are aimed at the sub $250 market, while the forthcoming ‘Cayman' and ‘Antilles' are higher end and significantly more expensive.

	Sapphire HD6870	Sapphire HD6850
Core Clock Speed	900mhz	775mhz
Stream Processors	1120	960
ROPs	32	32
Frame Buffer	1GB GDDR5	1GB GDDR5
Compute Power	2.0 TFLOPs	1.5 TFLOPs
Memory Width/Speed	256bit, 4.2GBPS	256bit, 4.0 GBPS
Idle/Load Board Power	19W/151W	19W/127W
Power Connectors	Dual 6 Pin	Single 6 Pin
Display Outputs	2xDVI + 2x mDP + 1 HDMI	2xDVI + 2x mDP + 1 HDMI

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