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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Goty - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Other reviews show 6850s hitting 1GHz+ with software voltage modification, so I don't think that will be an issue.karlostomy - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
The question then is, why did anandtech choose to include the EVGA card that NVIDIA no doubt hand picked and delivered?Including the OC 460 card is one thing, but at the very least some 'attempt' at oc'ing the 6850 would have retained a semblance of reviewer impartiality.
wyvernknight - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
According to this article i just read it can do 6 way eyefinity.http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/10/21/amds-6870-b...
The diagram is close to the bottom.
notty22 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The reviewer addressed why the 460 o/c was included. Owners/gamers are reporting the ability to clock their 460's to the 810,820,850 mhz the clocks various "special" models come @ with stock voltage. I agree , its more of why did Nvidia do this ? Imho, it was to position the card without competing/obsoleting the gtx 465/470. Now that Nvidia has lowered the prices, and the good price point the new AMD cards launched with, this is a exciting time for the gamer.Now lets get some new, more powerful dx11 games !
Thanx for the COMPLETE review !
Kyanzes - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I could have sworn that AvP had been mentioned as a future standard test game on Anandtech. I could be wrong ofc.3DVagabond - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I'm really surprised you went along with using the EVGA (OC) card nVidia sent you. They sent you what is commonly referred to as "a ringer", and you went along. You should have used the stock 460 (both models) and a stock 470, IMO. Why let nVidia name the conditions? They are obviously going to do everything they can to tilt the playing field. Was there anything else they wanted that you did for them?AnandThenMan - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Well in the article, they basically admitted to "caving in" to Nvidia by including the overclocked card. Obviously Nvidia was very keen to have a specific card included, seems dubious."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."
I mean stating, "a matter of editorial policy" then ignoring that policy outright seems pretty sketchy to me. Like you said, makes one question the results in general.
DominionSeraph - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
If AMD's official segmentation strategy were to put a factory overclocked 6870 against the GTX 470, what would be the issue with AnandTech comparing the two? Granted, it doesn't mean much to enthusiasts who would just buy a stocker and overclock it to pocket the price differential, but I'd wager a card bought by your average idiot buying off the shelves of Best Buy isn't going to see anything other than the factory clocks.bji - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Actually the people overclocking their video cards and then dealing with overheating and loud-as-an-aircraft-engine fan noise are the idiots.Just thought that if you were going to go around saying disparaging things about people who have different values than you do, that you might appreciate some of the same.
spigzone - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Maybe if you had dropped testing the FTW 460 for the time being, saving it for your 'overview' test next week, you would have had enough time to release a fully fleshed out and organized review instead of letting Nvidia jerk you around, compromising your own 'editorial policy' on only using stock cards in the initial review and saving you the time and trouble of coming up with lame @$$ rationalizations.