At the end of the summer, we had to say goodbye to the Canadian roots of the AMD graphics division, and, apparently, in vain. Surveys conducted on several foreign websites revealed an ambiguous attitude of respondents towards this decision. More than half of the participants regret that they will no longer see the familiar inscription, while an equal proportion no longer associate the three-letter abbreviation with video cards. In other words, ATi remembers and does not want to forget. Then why abandon a well-known brand? Perhaps AMD believes that it’s time to wean experienced and seasoned consumers from the outdated name, because everyone is young as if have already gotten used to the AMD console, and often don’t even remember about ATi.

But wait! All AMD/ATi graphics cards are still branded as "Radeon". What is this – double standards? A double situation has arisen when the authors describe the components: correctly - “ATi HD 5850”, incorrectly - “AMD HD 5850”, and for newly released graphics adapters the opposite is true. To be honest, it doesn't take long to get confused. Maybe it’s worth simplifying it to a simple Radeon prefix, and in six months or a year return to the manufacturer’s name. Based on the same surveys, 3/4 are inclined to consider ATi/AMD video cards to be Radeons, and who made them is not so important.

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This fall, contrary to familiar traditions, mid-price segment video cards were the first to be released, designed to expand the range of market positions rather than completely replace existing ones. If previously AMD did not have a single acceptable option between $179 and $229, now there is an attractive Radeon HD 6850 there.

Characteristics table

On this moment we can observe several competing cards from one company at once. So, until a certain time, HD 5850 and HD 6870 will coexist on the market. Naturally, as warehouses become depleted, the first one will disappear from the shelves.

You should not be strictly attached to the manufacturer’s “recommended price”; it is provided for comparison only. In reality, the amount required for the purchase directly depends on market conditions and seasonality ( ...or, to put it bluntly, the greed of the seller and all those who help video cards get into display cases - approx. ed.).

Characteristics	HD 5830	HD 5850	HD 5870	HD 6850	HD 6870	GTX 465	GTX 470	GTX 480
Codename	Cypress LE	Cypress Pro	Cypress XT	Barts Pro	Barts XT	GF100	GF100	GF100
Technical process, nm	40	40	40	40	40	40	40	40
Size cores/cores, mm 2.	334	334	334	255	255		Quantity transistors, million pieces	2154	2154	2154	1800	1800	3200	3200	3200
Core frequency, 2D\|3D, MHz	157 \| 800	157 \| 725	157 \| 850	100 \| 775	100 \| 900	50/100 \| 607/1215	50/100 \| 607/1215	50 / 100 \| 702/1402
Voltage on the core 2D\|3D, V	0,95 \| 1,15	0,95 \| 1,10	0,95 \| 1,15	0,96 \| 1,21	0,96 \| 1,21	0,9 \| 1,05	0,9 \| 1,0	0,96 \| 1,05
Number of shaders (PS), pcs.	1120	1440	1600	960	1120	352	448	480
Number of blocks rasterization (ROP), pcs.	16	32	32	32	32	32	40	48
Number of textures blocks (TMU), pcs.	56	72	80	48	56	44	56	64
Maximum fill speed, Gpix/sec	12,8	23,2	27,2	24,8	28,8	19,5	24,3	33,6
Maximum sampling speed textures, Gtex/sec	44,8	52,2	68	37,2	50,4	26,7	32,4	42,1
Version pixel/ver- text shaders	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0	5.0 / 5.0
Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Effective frequency memory, 2D\|3D, MHz	1200 \| 4600	1200 \| 4000	1200 \| 4800	300 \| 4000	300 \| 4200	67 \| 3206	67 \| 3306	67 \| 3700
Voltage on memory, 2D\|3D, V	1,6 \| 1,6	1,6 \| 1,6	1,6 \| 1,6	1,6 \| 1,63	1,6 \| 1,6	1,57 \| 1,6	1,57 \| 1,6	1,57 \| 1,6
Memory size, MB	1024	1024	1024 / 2048	1024	1024	1024	1280	1536
memory bus, bit	256	256	256	256	256	256	320	384
Bandwidth memory, GB/sec	147,2	128	153,6	128	134,4	102,6	133,9	177,4
Consumed power, 2D\|3D, W	24 \| 175	27 \|170	27 \|188	15 \|127	19 \| 151	nd \| 200	nd \| 215	nd \| 250
Crossfire/SLi	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Card size (LxWxH), mm	282x100x38	244x100x37	282x100x38	233x100x37	248x100x37	270x100x38	270x100x38	270x100x38
Recommended price, $	229	299	399	179	239	279 (229)	349 (259)	499

“...The performance of the Radeon HD 6870 fully corresponds to the price of 8,500 rubles. The card fits well between the HD 5870 and overclocked versions of the GTX 460, and in some cases even performs at the level of the more expensive GTX 470. If you are willing to spend on video

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Iron shop

In October 2009 we - AMD Radeon HD 5870. Six months later NVIDIA issued a response - GTX 480 And GTX 470, . Today the fight is reaching a new level: the new series video cards AMD - Radeon HD 6000. At the moment there are only two boards in the line - HD 6850 And HD 6870, and we are testing the older version.

Reread

Rumors about the appearance of a new series appeared long before the official release. Naturally, everyone thought that AMD was preparing a chip that would be able to overtake the GTX 480. It turned out to be not entirely true. It would be a stretch to call the series “new.” The video cards are based on a modified version of the old Cypress processors and are positioned as mid-end solutions. So no fps records.

The Radeon HD 6870 is equipped with a Barts crystal, an exact copy of the familiar Cypress with the HD 5870. Oddly enough, the processor turned out to be cut down: compared to its predecessor, the Barts “lacks” 450 million transistors. This means that the number of SIMD clusters has decreased - there are only 14 of them on the new crystal instead of 20. Hence the loss in the number of stream processors (on Barts there are 1120 versus 1600) and texture units (56 instead of 80).

AMD compensated for the losses simply: the processor frequency increased from 850 to 900 MHz. Plus, the card was equipped with an “adult” 256-bit bus and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with a frequency of 4200 MHz. The rasterization units were not affected either - all 32 ROPs are in place.

Freshness

There are also a number of improvements in Barts. Let's start with tessellation. AMD has two news here. First: tessellation engines work twice as fast. Second: you need to be more careful with the settings. As AMD explains, at extreme levels of tessellation, the model consists of so many polygons that the triangle takes up no more than one pixel on the screen. In this case, the rasterization units begin to slip. The optimal operating mode for them is 16 pixels per polygon, otherwise they are idle. Plus, such small particles have to be rendered several times, which also reduces performance. The conclusion, however, is bleak: we won’t see a better picture, we won’t be able to see new polygons.

The next improvement concerns anti-aliasing. AMD increased its speed and also introduced a new Morphological AA mode. Its essence is that the corners are smoothed after the frame has been rendered. In this case, the reference point for post-processing is not the edges of polygons or alpha textures, but sharp, contrasting transitions. Thus, anti-aliasing is not applied selectively, but to the entire image at once. The advantage of this approach is that the shader does not work with geometry, but with a ready-made scene, in fact with graphic file, so performance increases significantly compared to traditional multisampling (MSAA). Minus - with a low screen resolution, the picture turns out blurry.

AMD has also improved anisotropic filtering: now its quality and performance do not depend on the angle of rotation of the object. Additionally, the video decoding acceleration unit - UVD3 - was also updated. In addition to the VC-1 and H.264 formats, he was taught to work with MPEG-2 (DVD), MVC and MPEG-4 (DivX, xVid).

Pink glasses

Well, and the most important thing for us, players: AMD video cards now work with 3D Stereo. AMD call this feature HD3D, and it is radically different from what NVIDIA offers. Instead of developing its own technologies and launching new hardware, AMD used the help of partners.

To begin with, she found developers of special software that would convert photographs, videos and games into stereo images. Among the selected companies were iZ3D And DDD- they were given access to source codes drivers Catalyst. AMD then signed an agreement with monitor and glasses manufacturers. So if you want to try HD3D, you will need to buy the display from LG, Samsung, CMI or ViewSonic, and the glasses XpanD, RealD And Bit Cauldron. And the funny thing is, a set of the program and active glasses should cost less than a similar offer from NVIDIA. And most importantly, stereo image support is not included in the price of the video card; you won’t have to overpay for extra functionality.

On the table

AMD itself sent the Radeon HD 6870 for testing, so we will talk about the reference version. The video card differs from its predecessor in size (3 cm shorter) and appearance. The cooling system casing has become more angular, the red stripe and “exhaust holes” on the rear end of the video card have disappeared.

The board is cooled using the turbine principle: a 75 mm fan draws air under the casing, circulates it across the card and throws it outside the computer case. On the crystal itself there is an aluminum radiator, composed of 30 plates and penetrated by three copper heat-conducting tubes. During load, the card consumes only 151 W (37 W less than the HD 5870). In 2D mode, the HD 6870 requires 19 W. Power is provided by two 6-pin plugs. Thanks to the low heat dissipation, half the slot on the I/O panel is enough to exhaust hot air, the rest of the space is occupied by new video connectors.

By default, the Radeon HD 6870 is equipped with two DVIs, one HDMI 1.4a and a pair of mini-DisplayPort 1.2. Behind all these numbers there is a lot of interesting technologies. In DisplayPort 1.2, for example, it increased throughput. Now you can connect two monitors to one connector at once. To do this, you will need either a special splitter or a display with a DisplayPort input and output. Plus, version 1.2 added support for Blu-ray 3D and audio output in Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio quality.

The new version of HDMI has also learned to play Blu-ray 3D and, moreover, output stereo images to 3D TVs. True, the last function is more for show. TV manufacturers have not yet come to a unified stereo image specification, so no one can give a 100% guarantee of compatibility.

What's in a name?

Radeon HD 6000 is not the first time that an old architecture has been released under a new name. NVIDIA tested this scheme at one time when it released modified GeForce 8000 under the guise of a new series GeForce 9000, and later renamed the older versions altogether to GTS 250.

Why is this necessary? The answer is simple - attract the attention of the press and buyers. Well, seriously, the new video cards could have been called Radeon HD 5860 and HD 5840. But in this situation, AMD would not have been able to attract even a tenth of the attention that is now being paid to the new cards.

But there’s no point in grieving over the lost line. Very soon AMD will officially announce data on Radeon HD 6950, 6970 And 6990 . Now this will be a real top, on a completely new processor called Cayman.

Testing

Finding competitors for the new video card turned out to be difficult. At the time of submission of the magazine, the board had not yet gone on sale, so we had to focus on the AMD-recommended price of 8000-8500 rubles. This means that the HD 6870 is cheaper than the HD 5870, but more expensive than the HD 5850. Plus, it falls into the price category of the GTX 460 1 GB and its overclocked versions. The GTX 465 is also sold for the same money, and a little more expensively, for about 10,500 rubles, you can buy a GTX 470. After thinking a little, we decided to take all the video cards at once and compare the results.

To do this, we have assembled a powerful test bench based on a motherboard Foxconn Renaissance, installed on it Intel Core i7-920 and added 6 GB random access memory, typed with three bars Kingston HyperX DDR3-1666. Unfortunately, the list of tests turned out to be short. Since we tested the Radeon HD 6870 with beta drivers, we were unable to run the benchmark Colin McRaeDiRT 2. So we evaluated DX11 performance only in Aliens vs. Predator and synthetics Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0. But there were no problems with projects on DX10. Standard Resident Evil 5 And Devil May Cry 4- on the spot. We performed an overall performance assessment using 3DMark Vantage.

Balance

Synthetic test from Futuremark very accurately determined the position of the HD 6870: it falls short of the HD 5870 level by 13%, runs slightly slower than the GTX 470, and outperforms the GTX 460 and GTX 465. In the Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0, which evaluates performance in DX11, the work done by AMD on tessellation engines is clearly visible. In the synthetic test, the Radeon HD 6870 outperforms the more expensive HD 5870, but still lags behind all NVIDIA competitors.

In real gaming applications, the picture remains the same. The Radeon HD 6870 confidently outperforms not only the HD 5850 and GTX 460, 465, but also the GTX 470. With DX11 such superiority does not occur: the GTX 470 is 19% faster, which is quite logical.

* * *

The performance of the Radeon HD 6870 fully corresponds to the price of 8,500 rubles. The card fits well between the HD 5870 and overclocked versions of the GTX 460, and in some cases even performs at the level of the more expensive GTX 470. If you are willing to spend 8,500 rubles on a video card, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the right choice, it has no competitors.

Table 1

comparison table technical characteristics
Characteristic	AMD Radeon HD 6870	AMD Radeon HD 5870	AMD Radeon HD 5850	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
Core	Barts	Cypress	Cypress	GF100	GF100	GF104
Number of transistors	1.7 billion	2.15 billion	2.15 billion	3 billion	3 billion	1.95 billion
Technical process	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm
Number of stream processors	1120 pcs.	1600 pcs.	1440 pcs.	448 pcs.	352 pcs.	336 pcs.
Graphics core frequency	900 MHz	850 MHz	725 MHz	607 MHz	607 MHz	675 MHz
Stream processor frequency	900 MHz	850 MHz	725 MHz	1215 MHz	1215 MHz	1350 MHz
Type, memory capacity	GDDR 5.1 GB	GDDR5, 1 GB	GDDR5, 1 GB	GDDR5, 1.28 GB	GDDR5, 1 GB	GDDR5, 1 GB
Memory frequency	4200 MHz	4800 MHz	4000 MHz	3348 MHz	3200 MHz	3600 MHz
Data bus	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Number of texture blocks	56 pcs.	80 pcs.	72 pcs.	56 pcs.	44 pcs.	56 pcs.
Number of rasterization blocks	32 pcs.	32 pcs.	32 pcs.	40 pcs.	32 pcs.	32 pcs.
Interface	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Price as of November 2010	8500 rub.	12,000 rub.	7800 rub.	9500 rub.	7000 rub.	7000 rub.

table 2

Specifications
Synthetic tests
3DMark Vantage
Video card model	GPU	CPU	Overall
AMD Radeon HD 6870	15 131	16 493	15 450	100%
AMD Radeon HD 5870	17 402	17 326	17 383	113%
AMD Radeon HD 5850	14 832	17 597	15 427	100%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470	13 656	45 937	16 566	107%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465	11 674	42 636	14 264	92%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460	12 556	40 963	15 188	98%
	14 586	43 660	17 500	113%
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0
Video card model	FPS	Overall	Performance ratio
AMD Radeon HD 6870	13,8	348	100%
AMD Radeon HD 5870	11,4	288	83%
AMD Radeon HD 5850	11,4	288	83%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470	19,9	502	144%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465	16,7	421	121%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460	16,9	426	122%
Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum (900 MHz/4000 MHz)	19,6	494	142%

Table 3

Gaming tests (frames per second)
Game name, settings	AMD Radeon HD 6870	AMD Radeon HD 5870	AMD Radeon HD 5850	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460	Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum (900 MHz/4000 MHz)
Resident Evil 5 (DX10)
High, 1680x1050, AF 16x, AA 8x	96,1	105,8	92,4	97	83,7	83	97,4
High, 1920x1080, AF 16x, AA 8x	89,6	99,4	90,5	88,2	76,4	76,2	87,5
Performance ratio	100%	110%	98%	100%	86%	85%	100%
Devil May Cry 4 (SC2, DX10)
SuperHigh, 1680x1050, AF 16x, AA 8x	-	-	-	122	95,8	101,3	118,6
SuperHigh, 1920x1080, AF 16x, AA 8x	126,33	131,5	114,8	110,4	93,3	92,9	104,7
Performance ratio	100%	104%	91%	87%	74%	74%	83%
Aliens vs. Predator (Demo, DX11)
VeryHigh, 1680x1050, AF 16x, AA 2x	39,6	47,2	32,2	47,2	33,1	32	37,1
VeryHigh, 1920x1080, AF 16x, AA 2x	35,4	42,3	33,3	42,3	29,3	28,5	32,9
Performance ratio	100%	119%	87%	119%	83%	81%	93%

Value for money	100%	141%	92%	112%	82%	82%	96%
Performance ratio	100%	111%	92%	102%	81%	80%	92%

AMD Radeon HD 6870M(or ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6870) is a high-end mobile video card with support for DirectX 11. Essentially, it is the same ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 adapter with a slower core frequency. So the performance is about the same as legacy cards (UVD2 and primary Eyefinity technology are still supported).

Memory interface ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6870 consists of two 64-bit controllers that lead to a 128-bit memory bus that can access 1024 MB of DDR3 or GDDR5 video memory (512 MB GDDR3). If the laptop uses (G)DDR3 memory, then the performance will not be as good as with GDDR5.

HD 6870M uses 800 MADD cores (so-called stream processors), which are grouped into 160 five-dimensional groups. The cores support all DirectX 11 functions in hardware (tessellation, rendering of transparent and translucent objects, post-processing, shadow rendering, HDR textures). In addition, 16 ROP blocks, 40 TMU blocks and 40 TAU blocks can be found on the chip. As a result, 1040 Mio transistors offer theoretical computing power of up to 1.08 TFLOPS (for example, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 has this value of 1.12 TFLOPS). By the way, 1 TFLOPS is 1012 floating point operations per second.

The graphics card uses ATI Stream, OpenCL and DirectCompute 11 to perform general computing.

Gaming performance of the GPU is about the same as HD 5870, that is, quite acceptable for modern games (2010). All games except Metro 2033 and Crysis can be played with high resolution on high settings.

Series 6800M kart Mobility Radeon HD is equipped with an outdated UVD2 video processor, which is used to decode HD video using a graphics adapter. It only works with VC-1, H.264 and MPEG-2, but, unlike UVD3 (used in the 6900M series), it does not support DivX. With the advent of Flash 10.1, 6800M-series cards began to help accelerate Flash HD video (for example, YouTube).
Just like the Radeon HD 5870, the 6870M can transmit HD audio formats (such as Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio) to HDMI 1.3a (8 channels and 192 kHz / 24 bit).

6870M, still supports the first generation of Eyefinity technology (not the improved Eyefinity +), thanks to which you can connect up to 6 monitors to the graphics card simultaneously (as long as the laptop has enough DisplayPorts interfaces). Due to its high power consumption, the Mobility Radeon HD 6870M is installed in large laptops with a good (apparently loud) cooling system.

When comparing the adapter to desktop cards, the Mobility Radeon HD 6870M is between Radeon HD 5750 And 5770 .

Manufacturer:	AMD
Series:	Radeon HD 6870M 800@675MHz
Code:	Granville-PRO
Streams:	800 - unified
Clock frequency:	675 MHz* MHz
Shader frequency:	675 MHz* MHz
Memory frequency:	1000* MHz
Memory bus width:	128 Bit
Memory type:	DDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5
Maximum memory:	1024 MB
Common memory:	No
DirectX:	DirectX 11, Shader 5.0
Transistors:	1040 million
Technology:	40 nm
Additionally:	Eyefinity (up to 6 displays), HD Audio (Dolby True HD, DTS HD), HDMI 1.3a, Avivo HD (UVD2.2)
Laptop size:	big
Release date:	04.01.2011

*Clock speeds indicated may be subject to change by the manufacturer.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

Today is the 68th episode, yes, that’s it and not a cent more. Episode 68 of what? - Radeonov, of course. Moreover, 6870 is 3 times larger than 6850. The result? - Four Radeon HD 68xx accelerators will show you everything they are capable of.

By the way, do you see the picture above? This is a very beautiful country, it is also an entire island. Or maybe not an island, but something larger. In short, you need to guess what kind of country it is and understand how it relates to the topic of today's research. That is, to the Sapphire company, whose products we will separately study for the 21st time.

Whoever answers this question first and sends it to my email will receive a gift. I repeat: what is the connection between the country, a piece of which is shown in the picture above, and the Sapphire company. The question is very complex and is intended for old-timers who remember previous IT resources and their representatives, so only very few will be able to answer it. I’ll give you a hint right away: we’re not talking about offices or production.

And we continue our multi-part review of Sapphire products, which, as you know, are based on the diverse and very frequently changing Radeon family.

So, Radeon HD 68xx in four variations, brought up by Sapphire...

Boards


GPU: Radeon HD 6870 (Barts) Interface: PCI Express x16 GPU operating frequency (ROPs): 900 (nominal - 900) MHz 256 bit 224/900 (nominal - 224/900) 1120 48 (BLF/TLF/ANIS) Dimensions: PCB color: blue RAMDACs/TMDS: integrated into GPU Output Jacks: CrossFire (Hardware)

GPU: Radeon HD 6870 (Barts) Interface: PCI Express x16 GPU operating frequency (ROPs): 970 (nominal - 900) MHz Memory operating frequencies (physical (effective)): 1150 (4600) MHz (nominal - 1050 (4200) MHz) Memory bus width: 256 bit Number of computational units in the GPU/block operating frequency (MHz): 224/970 (nominal - 224/900) Number of operations (ALU) in block: 5 Total number of operations (ALU): 1120 Number of texturing units: 48 (BLF/TLF/ANIS) Number of rasterization units (ROP): 32 Dimensions: 270×100×33 mm (the last value is the maximum thickness of the video card) PCB color: blue RAMDACs/TMDS: integrated into GPU Output Jacks: 2×DVI (Dual-Link/HDMI), 2×mini-Display Port, 1×HDMI Multiprocessor support: CrossFire (Hardware)

GPU: Radeon HD 6870 (Barts) Interface: PCI Express x16 GPU operating frequency (ROPs): 900 (nominal - 900) MHz Memory operating frequencies (physical (effective)): 1050 (4200) MHz (nominal - 1050 (4200) MHz) Memory bus width: 256 bit Number of computational units in the GPU/block operating frequency (MHz): 224/900 (nominal - 224/900) Number of operations (ALU) in block: 5 Total number of operations (ALU): 1120 Number of texturing units: 48 (BLF/TLF/ANIS) Number of rasterization units (ROP): 32 Dimensions: 270×100×33 mm (the last value is the maximum thickness of the video card) PCB color: black RAMDACs/TMDS: integrated into GPU Output Jacks: 2×DVI (Dual-Link/HDMI), 2×mini-Display Port, 1×HDMI Multiprocessor support: CrossFire (Hardware)

GPU: Radeon HD 6850 (Barts) Interface: PCI-Express x16 GPU operating frequency (ROPs) (MHz): 775 (nominal - 775) Memory operating frequencies (physical (effective)): 1000 (4000) MHz (nominal - 1000 (4000) MHz) Memory bus width (bits): 256 Number of computational units in the GPU/block operating frequency (MHz): 192/775 (nominal - 192/775) Number of operations (ALU) in block: 5 Total number of operations (ALU): 960 Number of texturing units: 48 (BLF/TLF/ANIS) Number of rasterization units (ROP): 32 Dimensions (mm): 250×100×33 (the last value is the maximum thickness of the video card) PCB color: blue RAMDACs/TMDS: GPU integrated Output jacks: 2×DVI (Dual-Link/HDMI), 1×Display Port, 1×HDMI Multiprocessing support: CrossFire (Hardware)

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

The card has 1024 MB of GDDR5 SDRAM memory, located in eight chips on the front side of the PCB.

It makes sense to say that all cards require additional food, and 6870 - two 6-pin connectors. As for the 6850, you need to connect external power to only one 6-pin connector.

About cooling systems.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
The CO consists of three parts: a large radiator, a small radiator for batteries, and a casing. The large radiator is made in the form of a long rectangle with a recess in the center for a fan, under which an evaporation chamber is used as a base. The device cools both the core and memory chips. We have already written more than once about this kind of new CO, where evaporation chambers are used as the main cooling element. However, heat pipes are also available to enhance the effect.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
This card has exactly the same CO, so we’ll just continue its description. The evaporation chamber allows for more efficient heat transfer from the soleplate to the radiator fins; inside it there is a specially low-boiling liquid. The centrally mounted fan has a massive size and low rotation speeds, so the CO is very good in terms of quiet operation.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
In essence, the device is very similar in design to the previous one, however, this radiator does not have an evaporation chamber, but only heat pipes are used to transfer heat to the radiator fins. The fan is slightly smaller, but there are no complaints about it either. And the main difference is probably: this cooler only cools the core, the memory chips without cooling.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
It is clearly visible that the CO consists of two parts - a central cooler and radiators for cooling the memory, which work as if on their own, and the central device only cools the core. The device is of a cylindrical type, when a cylindrical fan is attached to one end, driving air through a radiator installed above the core. Despite the copper base, the radiator itself is small. In general, the device is quite quiet, and clearly indicates that the core heating is not so great.

We did the research temperature regime using the utility MSI Afterburner(author A. Nikolaychuk AKA Unwinder) and got the following results:

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

Research has very clearly shown us how much more efficient coolers produced by Sapphire or ordered by Sapphire are, compared to a reference cooler. In three cards with unique COs, the core heating does not exceed 66 degrees, while in the 6870, which has a reference cooler, the heating reached 80 degrees or more, although this is not critical for this kind of card.

Now about the configuration.

The basic package should include: a user manual, a disk with drivers and utilities, and a CrossFire bridge.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Basic kit, plus power splitters, DVI-to-VGA adapter, mini-DP-to-DP adapter, and an HDMI cable for direct connection to the receiver.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Completely similar kit.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
A similar picture.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
The same kit except for the mini-DP-to-DP adapter (due to unnecessary use).

Next up is consideration of the packaging.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
All four packages have a similar structure: it is a glossy super package, inside of which there is a box made of simple cardboard. The dust jacket designs are different, although it is not clear why the Toxic and VaporX cards, which have the same CO, have penguins and a naked monk on the boxes.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
I thought for a long time why designers associate the naked monk with higher frequencies, but I still couldn’t understand. Well, the shooting girl in different forms and guises has already set my teeth on edge.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Inside, the video card lies in a papier-mâché compartment, and is additionally wrapped in a soft bag, so that the card will be completely safe and sound during transportation. All 6870 cards have the same packaging principle.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
If the external design is exactly the same in essence, then inside the card is already in a cardboard compartment, which does not at all reduce its safety during transportation. We should also note the good and clear design of all the inscriptions that tell the user about all the main parameters of the card, with the exception of the memory bus.

Installation and drivers

Test bench configuration:

Computer on Intel based Core i7-975 (Socket 1366)
- Intel Core i7-975 processor (3340 MHz);
- Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard based on Intel X58 chipset;
- RAM 6 GB DDR3 SDRAM Corsair 1600 MHz;
- hard drive WD Caviar SE WD1600JD 160 GB SATA;
- power supply Tagan TG900-BZ 900 W.
operating room Windows system 7 64 bit; DirectX 11;
Dell 3007WFP monitor (30″);
ATI drivers version Catalyst 11.4beta; Nvidia versions 267.31/267.26/267.59/267.71.

VSync is disabled.

Test results: performance comparison

We used the following tools:

Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft) - DirectX 10.0, shaders 4.0 (HDR), the utility included with the game (Middle level) was used for testing. All settings are set to maximum quality. We thank Nvidia for providing licensed product.
Unigine Tropics Benchmark 1.3 (Unigine) - DirectX 10.0, . Test settings - High.
Unigine company and personally Alexandra Zapryagaeva
3DMark 11 (FutureMark) - DirectX 11.0, testing settings - Performance.
Aliens vs. Predator (2010) (Rebellion/SEGA), DirectX 11.0, testing settings - Very High, launch benchmark from the menu.
Crysis Warhead (Crytek/EA), DirectX 10.0, (batch file and demo for launch), testing settings - Very High, Cargo level is used. We thank Nvidia for providing the licensed product.
Formula 1 (2010) (Codemasters) - DirectX 11.0, testing settings - Ultra High (benchmark run: formulaone.exe -benchmark example_benchmark.xml). We thank Nvidia for providing the licensed product.
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0 (Unigine) - DirectX 11.0, . Test settings - High.
We would like to especially thank the team Unigine company and personally Alexandra Zapryagaeva for help in setting up the benchmark.
Colin McRae: DiRT2 (Codemasters) - DirectX 11.0, testing settings - Ultra High (run benchmark: dirt2.exe -benchmark example_benchmark.xml). We thank AMD for providing the licensed product.
Metro 2033 (4A Games/THQ) - DirectX 11.0, testing settings - Super High, PhysX disabled (run the benchmark in the game itself as separate file).
Just Cause 2 (Avalanche Studios/Eidos Interactive) - DirectX 10.0, testing settings - Super High (run the benchmark in the game itself in the settings). We thank Nvidia for providing the licensed product.

Readers who are well versed in 3D graphics cards will be able to draw their own conclusions by looking at the results presented in the charts below. And for beginners and those who have just taken up the issue of choosing a video card, we will make some explanations.

It makes sense to familiarize yourself with our short guides to the families of modern video cards and the processors on which they are produced. It should be noted the frequency of operation, support modern technologies(shaders), as well as pipeline architecture.

Now let's look at the tests.

Of the four cards we reviewed, only one had increased operating frequencies: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E. Research has shown that the card's performance was such that it fell almost in the middle between 6870 (at standard frequencies) and 6950. Considering that there is already a lot of data in the diagrams below, we did not clutter them with the indicators of the 6870 Toxic, since any a person can easily imagine the speed of a card in a particular application by mentally taking the arithmetic average of the indicators 6870 and 6950. Well, what did you want? - After all, when watching TV series, people think: how many generations were born, or what is the degree of relationship between the heroine and her potential groom...

Unigine Tropics Benchmark

All permissions on one page, No AA, No AF
All resolutions on one page, AA 4x + AF 16x

Usefulness rating based on gaming tests ONLY

№	Accelerator name	The rating is useful.	Prospect rating	Price
01		1075	927	305
02		1034	644	142
03		1018	683	165
04		996	741	203
05		994	860	285
06		973	726	199
07		956	908	315
08		953	836	278
09		923	804	262
10		922	590	132
11		920	695	185
12		890	476	86
13		870	932	384
14		842	656	185
15		838	960	405
16		815	568	137
17		814	629	174
18		749	867	372
19		706	1209	768
20		688	1018	573
21		630	1213	850
22		613	1196	850
23		547	371	77
24		543	1220	1007
25		538	1302	1146
26		536	357	79

Usefulness rating for all tests

№	Accelerator name	The rating is useful.	Prospect rating	Price
01	HD 5770 1024 MB, 850/850/4800	600	653	142
02	GTX 460 SE 1024 MB 680/1360/3400	577	688	165
03	HD 5670 1024 MB, 775/775/2000	575	490	86
04	HD 5750 1024 MB, 700/700/4600	563	605	132
05	HD 6850 1024 MB, 775/775/4000	543	745	203
06	GTX 560 Ti 1024 MB, 1000/2000/4580	540	915	305
07	GTX 460 1024 MB 675/1350/3600	538	729	199
08	HD 6950 1024 MB, 800/800/5000	522	866	285
09	HD 6790 1024 MB, 840/840/4200	513	695	185
10	GTS 450 1024 MB, 783/1566/3600	506	585	137
11	GTX 560 Ti 1024 MB, 822/1644/4000	500	834	278
12	HD 6870 1024 MB, 900/900/4200	490	807	262
13	HD 6950 2048 MB, 800/800/5000	488	896	315
14	GTX 550 Ti 1024 MB, 1000/2000/4400	487	666	185
15	GTX 550 Ti 1024 MB, 920/1840/4100	480	641	174
16	GTX 570 1280 MB, 732/1464/3800	432	916	384
17	HD 6970 2048 MB, 880/880/5500	419	946	405
18	GT 430 1024 MB, 700/1400/3600	415	398	77
19	HD 5570 1024 MB 650/650/1660	382	360	79
20	HD 5870 1024 MB, 850/850/4800	379	855	372
21	GTX 570 SLI 2×1280 MB, 732/1464/3800	342	1193	768
22	GTX 580 1536 MB, 775/1550/4000	332	991	573
23	HD 6990 2×2048 MB, 880/880/5000	309	1211	850
24	HD 6990 2×2048 MB, 830/830/5000	302	1193	850
25	GTX 590 2×1536 MB, 607/1215/3414	256	1187	1007
26	GTX 580 SLI 2×1536 MB, 775/1550/4000	254	1281	1146

We have already noted earlier that the Radeon HD 6850 is firmly in the top five of the most profitable cards in terms of price-speed-capability ratios. So this particular video card is of particular interest. But the 6870 lags far behind in the ratings, because the price is too and unjustifiably high. However, this all applies to the series as a whole, but conclusions must also be drawn for specific cards.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E- It’s worth recalling that this product successfully competes with the already numerous variants of the GTX 460. And the Sapphire variant enhances the positive impressions with its cooler. Very nice product. In addition, it has a full range of modern outputs: DVI, HDMI, DP.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E- despite the fact that in general the 6870 is not exactly a bargain due to its inflated prices, this option, again due to the unique and interesting CO, raises the bar for the 6870 and makes this product worth considering. And don’t forget about the set of output sockets for all occasions.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E- this product has the advantages of the previous product, but there are also increased operating frequencies, which sharply raises the bar for the demand for such a video card. In fact, even if the price is about the same as the GTX 560 Ti, then you can choose this 6870 option.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E- essentially a copy of the reference card. Unfortunately, the prices for such products, as our rating showed, are greatly inflated, and competitors in the form of the GTX 460 and the more expensive GTX 560 Ti occupy higher positions. So keep an eye on the prices. If the 6870 has it at the level of the GTX 460, then it makes sense.

The final decision, as usual, rests with our readers. We only provide information about the product reviewed, but do not provide direct instructions on the choice of a particular product.

Now let's return to the initial topic. About the riddle: it is for old-timers not only of IT, but also of hardware sites and resources. Let me remind you that whoever is the first to guess the connection between the country shown in the first picture in this article and the Sapphire company, and email me this answer, will receive a small gift. Hint number one: the connection is very original, and in the person of one person :). Hint number two: if anyone remembers the Reactor Critical website and its permanent host and founder, he will quickly guess. :-)

ATTENTION number ONE! Unfortunately, due to customs problems with sending gifts outside of Russia, we are forced to limit the circle of potential participants in the riddle competition only to residents of the Russian Federation. Our foreign readers can also participate if they have an address in Russia to send prizes there.

Attention number TWO! The winners of previously held riddle competitions in this kind of reviews are excluded from participation in the next competition.

The winners were determined: V. Demeshko, A. Bondarev and D. Kravchenko. And also an incentive prize went to S. Stepchenkov.

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED, so there is no need to submit any more answers!

Correct Answer: The photo is of Australia, and although many answered there was a connection between the Sapphire company name and the world famous sapphires from Australia, the question clearly stated that the Sapphire-Australia connection was through one employee. Indeed, the former owner of the popular 3D graphics site Reactor Critical, who goes by the nickname Kenguru (here is the Australian connection), now works for Sapphire Technology.

Based on the results of the study, we award the following cards in the “Original Design” category (for May 2011):

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

And in the “Excellent Delivery” category (for May 2011) we award the following cards:

Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E

Not long ago we published material about the new line of Radeon HD 6800 series video cards. It covered all aspects of the new technologies used in the accelerators of this line, as well as the improvements that video cards based on the Barts core have undergone. It was noted that the expected change in the process technology to 32 nm did not occur. New generation graphics chips AMD series Radeon HD 6800 will still be produced using the old 40 nm process technology, the beginning of which can be considered the presentation of the Radeon HD 4770, which took place back in April 2009. The entire Radeon HD 5000 line also used 40nm technology. This is because, as Eric Demers, technical director of the GPU division at AMD, said, “the commitment to a mature process technology at the moment is associated with economic reasons. Paying attention to the percentage of working crystals received today, the company was faced with the choice of mass production of two 32-nm or three 40-nm GPUs at the same price.” Given this fact, in the near future AMD will most likely abandon 32 nm and begin production using 28 nm technology.

Without changing the process, AMD will have a hard time positioning Barts as a significant step forward. Mainly, the new Barts GPU differs from its predecessor by major changes in the area of architectural optimization, increasing performance per watt of power consumed and millimeter of area, which improves overall efficiency. It also improved the main shortcomings of the previous ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, associated with low tessellation and geometry processing performance. As mentioned earlier in our reviews, these two shortcomings have become the most serious problem with AMD video cards compared to competing NVIDIA graphics accelerators.

It was initially expected that the AMD Radeon 6800 line would replace the AMD Radeon 5800, but this did not happen. As can be seen from the above diagram, there are practically no differences between the Barts and Cypress kernels. However, a simple count of the number of SIMD engines speaks volumes about the significantly lower performance of the updated Barts XT GPU compared to the Cypress core (Radeon HD 5870).

		AMD Radeon HD 6850	ATI Radeon HD 5870	ATI Radeon HD 5850	ATI Radeon HD 5830	ATI Radeon HD 4870
Codename	Barts XT
Number of transistors	1,7 billion
Number of stream processors
Performance, TFLOPs
Texture blocks
Texture filtering, GTexels/s
Number of ROPs
Pixel filtering, GPixels/s
Z/Stencil, GSamples/s
Core frequency, MHz
Memory frequency, GHz	1.05 (4.2 GHz effect) GDDR5	1.0 (4.0 GHz effect) GDDR5	1.2 (4.8 GHz effect) GDDR5	1.0 (4.0 GHz effect) GDDR5	1.0 (4.0 GHz effect) GDDR5	900 MHz (3.6 GHz effect) GDDR5
Memory bus width	256 bit
Memory bandwidth, GB/s
Frame buffer
Technical process	TSMC 40 nm
Maximum/minimum power consumption, W

The Radeon HD 6870 GPU uses fourteen SIMD engines, each consisting of four texture units and sixteen stream processors. One stream processor has five ALU units (stream cores). This gives the GPU a total of 1120 thread cores with 56 texture units. The result of GPU processing is output through the four output clusters of the rendering pipeline. Each cluster includes eight ROP (raster operation) pipelines, for a total of thirty-two ROP pipelines. The 256-bit memory interface is provided by four 64-bit memory controllers.

The numerical architecture characteristics and specification of the Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards are very similar to those of the Radeon HD 5830, but with double the back-end rendering pipeline. However, looking at the flip side, the Radeon HD 6870 uses the same back-end rendering pipeline as the Radeon HD 5870, but has fewer shader cores. For the Radeon HD 5830 video card, the main drawback was the halved number of ROP units, which caused performance delays. The Radeon HD 6870 can be called a modified and improved reincarnation of the Radeon HD 5830 graphics processor. The Barts XT core received two UTDP (Ultra-Thread Dispatch Processor) controls, while Cypress only had one, and some improvements were also made GPU responsible for processing tessellation algorithms. Such changes should provide almost twofold superiority of the new solution in processing tessellation streams over graphics accelerators of the previous series.

Another significant improvement that the Radeon HD 6870 has due to the optimized crystal structure is the ability to operate at higher high frequencies, which significantly affects the final performance. The Radeon HD 6870 clocks at 900 MHz, meaning the simplified Barts GPU core operates at a significantly higher speed. clock frequency than the Radeon HD 5830 or even the Radeon HD 5850. This increase in frequency results in an increase in overall GPU performance of almost 25% compared to the Radeon HD 5850 running at 725 MHz. As a result, the smaller number of ALUs and texture units in the Radeon HD 6870, compared to the Radeon HD 5850, is fully compensated for increased frequency work of the GPU core, which practically equalizes their performance.

All of these improvements allow the Radeon HD 6870 to be more powerful than the Radeon HD 5850 with 25% less die area. This change clearly reduces power consumption in idle mode and the cost of manufacturing the core itself as a whole. These two clear advantages should have a positive impact on the popularity of the final product. The Radeon HD 6870 memory operates at a native frequency of 1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective), slightly faster than the Radeon HD 5850 (1000 MHz). According to the manufacturers, the retail price of the Radeon HD 6870 will be $240, which is slightly less than the $260 for the Radeon HD 5850.

The theoretical information is very encouraging, but you always want to get concrete results in test applications. For these purposes, a video accelerator came into our laboratory. The model provided by MSI is a complete copy of the reference sample produced at AMD factories. It is for this reason that our review and testing will essentially describe the reference solution Radeon HD 6870 from AMD.

Specification

There is nothing unusual in the specification; all the characteristics of the reference solution have already been listed above; now we just need to repeat them for a specific copy sold under the MSI brand.

	MSI Radeon HD 6870 (R6870-2PM2D1GD5)
Graphics core	AMD Radeon HD 6870 (Barts XT)
Conveyor	1120 unified streaming
Supported APIs	DirectX 11 (Shader Model 5.0) OpenGL 4.1
Core frequency, MHz
Memory volume (type), MB
Memory frequency (effective), MHz
Memory bus, bit
Bus standard	PCI Express X16 2.1
Maximum resolution	Up to 4 displays, 1920x1200 each Up to 2560x1600 Dual-link DVI or 1920x1200 Single-link DVI Up to 2048x1536 VGA (via DVI-to-VGA adapter) Up to 1920x1200 HDMI 1.4 Up to 2560x1600 DisplayPort
	2x DVI-I (VGA via adapters) 1x HDMI 1.4 2x mini DisplayPort (DisplayPort via adapters)
HDCP support	Eat Decoding MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1 and H.264/AVC, MVC, Adobe Flash
Drivers	Fresh drivers can be downloaded from: - GPU manufacturer website: - support site.
Products webpage

The table shows several innovations that the “reference” Radeon HD 6870 video cards began to have. The DisplayPort 1.2 port allows you to display images on several monitors at once using a special hub, and a different resolution can be set for each monitor. Supports up to four displays with resolutions up to 1920x1200 each. However, in total, up to six monitors can be connected to the accelerator using two hubs and two DVI-I connectors, but with a resolution of up to 1600x900.

The presence of HDMI 1.4 will allow the user to take advantage of the technology for transmitting 3D stereo images, which is necessary for connecting 3D monitors. Support for new OpenGL 4.1 and AMD HD3D technologies has appeared, and the AMD Eyefinity and AMD EyeSpeed technologies that are already well known to us from the 5800 series of accelerators remain. Such a variety of new possibilities for using the accelerator will be a worthy response from AMD to the partially similar technological solutions proposed by NVIDIA in the 400 series.

The video accelerator is presented in a tight box. Its design emphasizes the ability to work with MSI's proprietary overclocking utility Afterburner. The company logo is visible at the top, and right side GPU manufacturer AMD RADEON GRAPHICS is mentioned, which indicates that this line is being released by AMD, and not by ATI (AMD) as was previously the case. Below is the R6870 graphics core itself, the accelerator has 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, support for DirectX 11 and the presence of two mini DisplayPort connectors on the rear panel. Mini DisplayPort connectors can connect up to four screens via a dedicated hub using AMD Eyefinity technology. At the very bottom there are logos of the product’s support for proprietary MSI technologies for overclocking and the use of capacitors of increased reliability and durability on the PCB board.

The last two features are described in more detail on the back of the box.

Here at the top the model of the graphics accelerator R6870-2PM2D1GD5 is indicated, and below we describe in detail the support for the MSI Afterburner utility, which allows you to overclock both one accelerator and several installed in CrossFireX mode. It is possible to save overclocking profiles, as well as profiles with reduced frequencies of the video card, which leads to energy savings and reduced heat dissipation, and therefore a decrease in the total system noise. Below is the use of solid capacitors in this model, which guarantee 10 years of trouble-free operation. On the right are the main advantages of this accelerator in 30 languages. The packaging leaves the impression of a high-quality finished product and has complete information about the internal contents.

The MSI Radeon HD 6870 (R6870-2PM2D1GD5) package is quite decent:

Two adapters from two peripheral power connectors to one 6-pin video card power connector;
CrossFire bridge;
Disk with drivers and utilities;
Brief instructions for installing a video card;
Adapter from mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort;
Adapter from DVI to VGA.

A completely justified kit that provides 80% of requests regular user. But to connect a group of displays here, you will obviously have to purchase the necessary adapters or a special hub, with simultaneous support for up to four monitors.

Compared to the flagship from NVIDIA, a video card based on the GeForce GTX 480, the new solution from AMD looks more elegant. This is not only a first impression, but judging by the announced innovations from AMD, the accelerators on the Radeon HD 6870 should have half the power consumption with comparable performance in some applications. The Radeon HD 6870 video card differs from the “top” solutions of both manufacturers in its shorter length; it, like the Radeon HD 5870, has two 6-pin additional power connectors located on the upper end of the video card. Connecting additional power will not cause any inconvenience, and the wires themselves will not interfere with the installation of the video card, increasing its length due to the connectors themselves and the wires extending from them.

Surprisingly, the reference sample has only one CrossFire connector. Most likely, in the future, solutions from another manufacturer will appear that have two CrossFire connectors, which are very useful for increasing the overall performance of the video system when connecting this accelerator in CrossFireX modes together with other similar models.

The back of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video card does not have any technological holes; everything here is covered with a plastic casing that harmoniously complements the overall design of the accelerator. It's nice that the power connectors are turned upward - this allows the accelerator to be compatible with a large number of cases.

The reverse side of the accelerator did not receive a single significant element.

Thanks to the two-slot design of the cooling system, five display connectors fit on the rear panel of the accelerator (2x DVI-I, HDMI 1.4, 2x mini DisplayPort 1.2). There is also a fairly large grille for removing hot air from the case. This variety of connection connectors will ensure the AMD Radeon HD 6870 is fully compatible with all modern offerings in the image output device market.

On the front side printed circuit board You can highlight the graphics processor and the eight video memory chips surrounding it. All elements of the GPU power supply system and accelerator memory are also located here.

The GPU frequency is 900 MHz. The Barts XT chip itself is made using a 40 nm process technology and contains 1120 universal shader pipelines and thirty-two rasterization units, and data exchange between the graphics core and memory is carried out via a 256-bit bus.

When there is no load, the chip's operating frequency drops to 100 MHz, and the video memory slows down to 81 MHz (effective frequency 324 MHz). At the same time, the supply voltage is also reduced, which provides a noticeable reduction in power consumption and temperature.

Video memory with a total capacity of 1 GB is composed of eight GDDR5 chips manufactured by Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2C with an access time of 0.8 ns, which allows them to operate at an effective frequency of up to 5000 MHz. Since the resulting operating frequency of the memory chips on the video card is slightly lower and amounts to 4200 MHz, there remains a good frequency range in reserve, which we hope can be used during overclocking.

The accelerator has a 4+2-phase power supply circuit. Here, four phases go to the GPU and are implemented using the Chil CHL8214 controller, which has support for the I2C protocol. This protocol should provide softvoltmod using new version MSI Afterburner utilities. The MSI Afterburner 2.0.0 utility that came with the video card did not allow me to change the voltage on the GPU.

The cooling system itself consists of two parts. The metal casing, through a thermal interface, comes into contact with all the hot elements of the board: video memory chips and elements of the power subsystem. To cool the GPU, a separate design is used - a massive aluminum radiator with three copper heat pipes of different diameters, which are soldered to a copper plate in contact with the GPU crystal. The central copper tube of increased diameter should facilitate more efficient heat dissipation from the GPU crystal. The thermal interface is quite viscous, which should also have a positive effect on the overall efficiency of the cooling system. A turbine-type fan of standard dimensions is more than enough to cool the GPU. In general, the cooling system can be called improved and more technologically advanced compared to the reference turbine used on hot 5800 series models.

To evaluate the efficiency of the cooling system, we used the utility FurMark, and detailed monitoring was carried out using GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner.

Working at standard frequencies and automatically controlling the turbine speed, the graphics processor warmed up to 82°C. Considering that the turbine rotation speed was only 35% of the maximum and the entire cooler worked quietly, we can talk about the low heat release of the accelerator and the excellent operation of the “reference” cooling system in automatic mode.

After we are in manual mode We set the turbine rotation speed to maximum without removing the load, the cooler began to make noticeable noise, but the temperature of the graphics core dropped to 67 degrees.

In general, the cooling system used on the reference AMD solution The Radeon HD 6870 showed high efficiency, while remaining quite quiet in operation.

During testing, we used Video Card Test Stand No. 2

CPU	Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (LGA775, 2.83 GHz, L2 12 MB) @3.8 GHz
motherboards	ZOTAC NForce 790i-Supreme (LGA775, nForce 790i Ultra SLI, DDR3, ATX)GIGABYTE GA-EP45T-DS3R (LGA775, Intel P45, DDR3, ATX)
Coolers	Noctua NH-U12P (LGA775, 54.33 CFM, 12.6-19.8 dB) Thermalright SI-128 (LGA775) + VIZO Starlet UVLED120 (62.7 CFM, 31.1 dB)
Additional cooling	VIZO Propeller PCL-201 (+1 slot, 16.0-28.3 CFM, 20 dB)
RAM	2x DDR3-1333 1024 MB Kingston PC3-10600 (KVR1333D3N9/1G)
Hard disks	Hitachi Deskstar HDS721616PLA380 (160 GB, 16 MB, SATA-300)
Power supplies	Seasonic M12D-850 (850 W, 120 mm, 20 dB)Seasonic SS-650JT (650 W, 120 mm, 39.1 dB)
Frame	Spire SwordFin SP9007B (Full Tower) + Coolink SWiF 1202 (120x120x25, 53 CFM, 24 dB)
Monitor	Samsung SyncMaster 757MB (DynaFlat, 2048x1536@60 Hz, MPR II, TCO"99)

Choose what you want to compare Radeon HD6870 1GB DDR5 MSI with

When assessing the test results, one should not forget that the performance of a graphics accelerator, among other things, also depends on driver optimization. Therefore, the results were not entirely clear. In half of the tested games, the performance of the MSI Radeon HD 6870 video card is between the performance of the Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. At the same time, sometimes the Radeon HD 6870 is on par with the Radeon HD 5870. At the same time, there are a couple of games where the Radeon HD 6870 video accelerator is inferior even to the Radeon HD 5850. Thus, in terms of performance, the Radeon HD 6870 can be considered approximately equal to the Radeon HD 5850. But this is in games without tessellation, that is, with support for only DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Comparing the performance of the MSI Radeon HD 6870 with NVIDIA video cards , we can note the superiority over the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB of memory, sometimes reaching 20%. The video accelerator on the GeForce GTX 470 is on par with the MSI Radeon HD 6870 in many tests, but there are games in which the former has noticeably better performance.

Based on the results of the synthetic application Uniengine Heaven 1.0, we can state the clear progress of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video accelerator when constructing 3D scenes with tessellation. Of course, the Barts graphics core does not have a twofold increase in performance in tests with tessellation compared to Cypress, but the increase is clearly noticeable. As a result, the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video accelerator showed a result very similar to the GeForce GTX 470, which in itself is significant.

OverclockingMSI Radeon HD 6870 (R6870-2PM2D1GD5)

The video card, when cooled by its standard turbine operating in maximum efficiency mode, was able to operate stably at frequencies: 975 MHz for the graphics core (+8.3%) and 1160 MHz (+10.4%) for video memory, which ensured its operation at efficient frequency 4640 MHz. This is not the most best result for the GPU, but the situation should change dramatically with the release of a utility that allows you to increase the supply voltage on the graphics core. Memory chips also could not fully exhaust their potential, but an increase of 10% can also be considered a completely normal result. Now it’s worth evaluating the performance gain we received from overclocking in real tests.

As can be seen from the table, the increase in performance in some applications reaches 10%, which will provide a pleasant bonus for the owner, but this will not be enough to change the overall picture of efficiency among video cards of the same class.

Energy consumption

The power consumption of a video card is often an important selection criterion. In the table below you can estimate the level of power consumption of systems with modern video cards compared to the MSI Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5.

Test package	Standard frequencies	Overclocked video card	Productivity gain, %
























Far Cry 2, Maximum Quality, NO AA/AF, fps


MSI GeForce GTS 450 1GB GDDR5 CYCLONE
Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 1 GB GDDR5 FleX
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1GB GDDR5
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5
MSI Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 AMP! 1280 MB GDDR5
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 1.5 GB GDDR5
MSI Radeon HD 5970 2GB GDDR5

The power consumption of the MSI Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 video card can be roughly equated to the power consumption of the Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5. The competitor's solution based on the GeForce GTX 460 accelerator with 1GB of GDDR5 memory has a slightly lower level of power consumption. The GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 video card is superior in energy consumption to the MSI Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5, in fact, as well as in performance. As you can see, everything is in its place, so it is very difficult to talk about any significant superiority of the Barts graphics core over Cypress in terms of better performance per watt of energy expended. Perhaps the power consumption of the new chip has decreased, but not very much.

Two other “top” NVIDIA accelerators stand out separately: GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480. In terms of power consumption, the GeForce GTX 470 is inferior to the Radeon HD 6870 by approximately 60 W in load mode, and the difference between the power consumption of the GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 6870 is as much as 140 Tue It is noticeable that NVIDIA engineers tried to get the most out of their graphics accelerator on the GF100. As a result, the power consumption of the GeForce GTX 480 1.5 GB GDDR5 turned out to be almost the same as that of the dual-chip MSI Radeon HD 5970 2GB GDDR5 video card.

conclusions

The first-born of the new generation of AMD video cards was not as productive as expected, but considering the recommended price for solutions based on the Barts core, we can safely say that they are highly competitive in terms of price/performance. Although the price criterion for selection can still be challenged due to the temporary absence of Radeon HD 6870 models for free sale. In summary, we can largely praise the 6800 series of AMD accelerators for their implementation in the new line large quantity new features such as: use of DisplayPort 1.2 with support for up to 4 displays via a hub; HDMI 1.4, allowing the user to take advantage of 3D image transmission technology; support for new OpenGL 4.1 and AMD HD3D technologies. AMD engineers did not leave aside such well-known technologies as AMD Eyefinity and AMD EyeSpeed. TO good qualities accelerators on the Radeon HD 6870 can be attributed to their reduced heat dissipation compared to the 5800 series and increased efficiency per millimeter of die area and the very low noise level of a standard turbine, even at maximum load it is below average.

The video card we tested directly MSI Radeon HD 6870 (R6870-2PM2D1GD5) is not much different from the reference sample, but MSI engineers will soon provide the proprietary MSI Afterburner utility with the ability to change the voltage on the video accelerator GPU, which should significantly affect its overclocking capabilities. Video cards based on the Radeon HD 6870 should level out the small advantage that NVIDIA received with the release of the 400 series of video cards. For this, AMD's Barts core has all the prerequisites, and most importantly, enough low price for graphics accelerators on Radeon HD 6870.

Advantages:

Low recommended price;
Low noise level of a standard turbine;
Supports ATI Eyefinity technology for connecting up to 6 displays;
Supports DirectX 11 (Shader Model 5.0), OpenGL 4.1 and AMD HD3D.
Availability of DisplayPort 1.2 with support for up to 4 displays via a hub;
HDMI 1.4 support for 3D stereo imaging technology;

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Radeon hd 6870 year of manufacture. Computer resource U SM