AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTNVIDIA’s 6870 Competitor & the Test
As we mentioned on the front page of this article, AMD and NVIDIA don’t officially have competing products at the same price points. The 6870 and 6850 are more expensive than the GTX 460 1GB and 768MB respectively, and above the 6870 is the GTX 470. However NVIDIA is particularly keen to have a competitor to the 6870 that isn’t a GTX 470, and so they’re pushing a 2nd option: a factory overclocked GTX 460 1GB.
As a matter of editorial policy we do not include overclocked cards on general reviews. As a product, reference cards will continue to be produced for quite a while, with good products continuing on for years. Overclocked cards on the other hand come and go depending on market conditions, and even worse no two overclocked cards are alike. If we did normally include overclocked cards, our charts would be full of cards that are only different by 5MHz.
However with the 6800 launch NVIDIA is pushing the overclocked GTX 460 option far harder than we’ve seen them push overclocked cards in the past –we had an EVGA GTX 460 1GB FTW on our doorstep before we were even back from Los Angeles. Given how well the GTX 460 overclocks and how many heavily overclocked cards there are on the market, we believe there is at least some merit to NVIDIA’s arguments, so in this case we went ahead and included the EVGA card in our review. As a reference point it's clocked at 850Mhz and 4GHz memory versus 675MHz core and 3.6MHz memory for a stock GTX 460, giving it a massive 26% core overclock and a much more moderate 11% memory overclock.
However with that we’ll attach the biggest disclaimer we can that while we’re including the card, we don’t believe NVIDIA is taking the right action here. If they were serious about having a higher clocked GTX 460 on the market, then they need to make a new product, such as a GTX 461. Without NVIDIA establishing guidelines, these overclocked GTX 460 cards can vary in clockspeed, cooling, and ultimately performance by a very wide margin. In primary reviews such as these we’re interested in looking at cards that will be around for a while, and without an official product from NVIDIA there’s no guarantee any of these factory overclocked cards will still be around.
If nothing else, pushing overclocked cards makes for a messy situation for buyer. An official product provides a baseline of performance that buyers can see in reviews like ours and expect in any cards they buy. With overclocked cards, this is absent. Pushing factory overclocked cards may give NVIDIA a competitive product, but it’s being done in a way we can’t approve of.
Moving on, for today’s launch we’re using AMD’s latest beta launch drivers, version 8.782RC2, which is analogous to Catalyst 10.10. For the NVIDIA cards we’re using the WHQL version of 260.89.
Keeping with our desire to periodically refresh our benchmark suite, we’ve gone ahead and shuffled around a few benchmarks. We’ve dropped Left 4 Dead (our highest performing benchmark) and the DX11 rendition of BattleForge for Civilization 5 and Metro 2033 respectively, both running in DX11 mode.
With the refresh in mind, we’ve had to cut short our usual selection of cards, as we’ve had under a week to (re)benchmark everything and to write this article, shorter than what we usually have for an article of this magnitude. We’ll be adding these new cards and the rest of our normal lineup to the GPU Bench early next week when we finish benchmarking them.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB FTW |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 260.89 AMD Catalyst 10.10 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
No it more looks like NV have been playing around with rivatuner.Their cards at stock speed is a toaster. Overclocking again just before an AMD release does not make it better.
If they can sell cards at higher speeds do it. Release it. Dont talk about it, or coverdly hide behind factory overclocked cards. Pathetic and weak.
The sad thing about it is they made Anand change their methology.
What a sad result when the start was just bad gfx cards.
MrSpadge - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Not sure it was mentioned before: Cypress and RV770 run FP64 at 2/5th the FP32 speed, not 1/5th as written on the first page.MrS
Quantumboredom - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It's 2/5 for addition, but 1/5 for multiplication and FMA as I recall it.krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I you want real world testning for solid buying knowledge and no idiotic mixing of oc and non oc cards go to HardocpAnand needs to do a solid review of his own gfx reviews. This is stoneage methology with a fishy smell.
For the ssd there was an excellent revision with the real world bm suite introduction, - a revision far deeper is needed here.
chillmelt - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I agree. Comparing a non-OC'd card to an OC'd one is in no way fair. The 6870 clearly clubbered 460 gtx in virtually all benchmarks, at stock speeds.krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Yes. Think about this scenario: For this review anand (kyle) decided to use an overclocked Sapphire 6870 and compare it to a stock speed 460.What would happen? How would that look?
Its the same thing happening here.
mindbomb - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
if they are in the same price range, they should be compared.it gives the consumer more information on his purchasing decision.
idk why this arbitrary oc/non-oc rule comes into play. It was a factory overclock, and required nothing on the part of the end user.
krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Okey. Now take an OC 6850, 900Mhz, and compare it to a far more expensive stock 460 1G?Where does this end. AMD and NV suplying the sites with factory overclocked cards for reviews. Its going to be a f..king mess. No one knows about availability, time period and so on.
Regarding pruchasing decision all the methology is plain wrong. Go to Hardocp if you consider buying a card. Here you have real world testing. Not like this old bad - and now fishy - methology of anand.
Why does he change methology just when he is getting the new cards. Hmm. Thats simply very bad science.
NV should concentrate on making cards that performs instead of using ressources putting pressure on sites like anand. If they have faster 460 models release it, or stop spinning.
Its a pain to read and watch. And its a shame for a site, that have the ressources to do proper testing, but dont have the balls any more.
We dont like AMD, Intel nor NV to influence the reviews. Right now there is an obvious bad influence from especially NV. And you, and everyone can see it. Dont underestimate the consequenses.
bji - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
You COMPLETELY missed the point. *IF* the OC 6850 was a factory overclocked card, sold at a price that puts it in the range of cards reviewed, then it *WOULD* make sense to compare it.So your example just further makes the point.
krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Well as it stands now they dont release oc cards at launch day, but that will soon change..., if Anand and others dont stick to their policy