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AMD recently announced the HD 6000 graphics series, which currently has two models – HD 6850 and HD 6870. Just like the previous AMD graphics cards, higher numbers mean faster cards but cross-gen comparisons have gotten a bit more complicated. Namely, one would say that HD 6870 is the new and improved version of HD 5870, but one would be wrong as the HD 6870 is slower than HD 5870 but faster than HD 5850.
Today, our guest is Sapphire’s HD 6870, a card based on reference design.
HD 6870 is AMD’s second in line DirectX 11 architecture codenamed Northern Islands. The graphics chip used on HD 6870 and HD 6850 is branded Barts and is made in 40nm. Barts is a direct result of AMD’s HD 5800 optimization efforts and it comes in two versions – Barts XT (HD6870) with 1120 shaders and Barts PRO (HD6850) with 960 shaders. The fine tuned architecture now provides better performance per watt and mm2 compared to the previous, Evergreen generation.
Sapphire HD 6870 will cost you about €204, here. Judging by the price and performance, Sapphire HD 6870 already sounds like a nice deal especially for those on the prowl for a decent gaming card. Below you see GPUZ snapshot confirming the card’s reference clock. You can find plenty of other info as well, such as compute power of 2.0 TFLOPs.
