AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTFinal Words
Going in to our first meeting with AMD, we weren’t quite sure what to expect with the Radeon HD 6800 series. After all, how do you follow up on the blockbuster that was Cypress and the Radeon HD 5800 series?
The answer is that you don’t, at least not right away. With AMD’s choice of names in mind, Barts and the 6800 series isn’t the true successor to Cypress; but it is the next generation of Radeon for another market. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great product line though – in fact that’s far from it.
The 6800 series hits the one market segment that AMD couldn’t reach with either the 5800 series or the 5700 series: the $200 market. As we said back in July when we crowned the GTX 460 the $200 king, the most successful chips are those chips that are designed from the get-go for the market they’re being sold in. The GTX 460 succeeded where the Cypress could not, as the penalty for using a harvested Cypress chip for that market was too severe and AMD had little else to work with.
Now 3 months later AMD has their appropriate answer to the $200 market in the form of Barts and the Radeon HD 6800 series. The Barts GPU is small enough to cheaply produce for that market, and with AMD’s rebalanced design it’s capable of trailing the 5800 series by only 7%, making Cypress-like performance available for prices lower than before. It’s the missing link that AMD has needed to be competitive with the GTX 460.
As a result, even with NVIDIA’s latest round of price drops AMD has managed to dethrone the $200 king, and in the process is reshaping the competitive market only recently established by the GTX 460. With AMD and NVIDIA’s price stratification there are very few head-to-head matchups, but there are a few different situations that bear looking at.
At the top end we have the Mexican standoff between the recently price-reduced GTX 470, the newly released Radeon HD 6870, and the overclocked GTX 460 as represented by the EVGA GTX 460 1GB FTW. At $260 the GTX 470 is several percent faster than the 6870, and at only $20 more NVIDIA has done a good job pricing the card. If performance is your sole concern, than the GTX 470 is hard to beat at those prices – though we suspect NVIDIA isn’t happy about selling GF100 cards at such a low price.
Meanwhile if you care about a balance of performance and power/heat/noise, then it’s the 6870 versus the EVGA GTX 460; and the EVGA card wins in an unfair fight. As an overclocked card in a launch card article we’re not going to give it a nod, but we’re not going to ignore it; it’s 5% faster than the reference 6870 while at the same time it’s cooler and quieter (thanks in large part to the fact that it’s an open-air design). At least as long as it’s on the market (we have our doubts about how many suitable GPUs NVIDIA can produce), it’s hard to pass up even when faced with the 6870.
Without the EVGA card in the picture though, the 6870 is clearly sitting at a sweet spot in terms of price, performance, and noise. It’s faster than the 5850 while drawing only as much power and yet it’s still slightly quieter. Meanwhile it completely clobbers the reference clocked GTX 460 1GB in gaming performance, although with NVIDIA’s new prices and the $30 premium we would hope that this is the case. If nothing else the 6870 wins by default – NVIDIA doesn’t have a real product to put against it.
As for the Radeon HD 6850 however, things are much more lopsided in AMD’s favor. It’s give and take depending on the benchmark, but ultimately it’s just as fast as the GTX 460 1GB on average, even though it’s officially $20 cheaper. And at the same time it draws less power and produces less noise than the GTX 460 1GB. In fact unless the GTX 460 1GB was cheaper than the 6850, we really can’t come up with a reason to buy it. For all the advantage of an overclock when going up against the 6870, the stock clocked card has nothing on the 6850. Even the GTX 460 768MB, while $10-$20 cheaper than the 6850, still has to contend with the fact that the 6850 is almost 10% faster and only marginally louder.
In fact our only real concern is that while the reference 6850 is a great card, the XFX card is less so – XFX heavily prioritized temperatures over noise, and while this pays off with a load temperate even better than the GTX 460, it comes at the price of noise levels exceeding even the 6870. Shortly before publication we got a note from XFX that they’re going to work on releasing a BIOS with a less aggressive fan, which hopefully should resolve the issue. In the meantime we suggest checking back here next week, as we’ll have several custom 6850s arriving next week that we’ll be reviewing as part of a 6850 roundup.
Wrapping things up, we believe this will probably go down as being the most competitive card launch of the year. AMD and NVIDIA reposition themselves against each other with every launch, but by first launching the Radeon HD 6000 series against NVIDIA’s mid-to-high range GTX 460, AMD has gone head-first in to one of NVIDIA’s most prized markets, and NVIDIA is pushing right back. If you would have told us 3 months ago that we would have been able to get GTX 460 1GB performance for $180 only a couple months later, we likely would have called you mad, and yet here we are. The competitive market is alive and then some.
Ultimately this probably won’t go down in history as one of AMD’s strongest launches – there’s only so much you can do without a die shrink – but it’s still a welcome addition to the Radeon family. With a new generation of Radeon cards taking their foothold, we now can turn our eyes towards the future, and to see what AMD will be bringing us with the Radeon HD 6900 series and the Cayman GPU.
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StriderGT - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I agree with you that the inclusion of the FTW card was a complete caving and casts shadows to a so far excellent reputation of anandtech. I believe the whole motivation was PR related, retaining a workable relation with nvidia, but was it worth it?!Look how ugly can this sort of thing get, they do not even include the test setup... Quote from techradar.com:
We expected the 6870 to perform better than it did – especially as this is essentially being pitched as a GTX 460 killer.
The problem is, Nvidia's price cuts have made this an impossible task, with the FTW edition of the GTX 460 rolling in at just over £170, yet competently outperforming the 6870 in every benchmark we threw at it.
In essence, therefore, all the 6870 manages is to unseat the 5850 which given its end of life status isn't too difficult a feat. We'd still recommend buying a GTX 460 for this sort of cash. All tests ran at 1,920 x 1,080 at the highest settings, apart from AvP, which was ran at 1,680 x 1,050.
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-compone...
oldscotch - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
...where a Civilization game would be used for a GPU benchmark.AnnihilatorX - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It's actually quite taxing on the maps. It lags on my HD4850.The reason is, it uses DX 11 DirectCompute features on texture decompression. The performance is noticeably better on DX11 cards.
JonnyDough - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
"Ultimately this means we’re looking at staggered pricing. NVIDIA and AMD do not have any products that are directly competing at the same price points: at every $20 you’re looking at switching between AMD and NVIDIA."Not when you figure in NVidia's superior drivers, or power consumption...depending on which one matters most to you.
Fleeb - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I looked at the load power consumption charts and saw the Radeon cards are better in this department and I don't clearly understand your statement. Did you mean that the nVidia cards in these tests should be better because of superior power consumption or that their power consumption is superior in a sense that nVidia cards consume more power?jonup - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I think he meant the nVidia has better drivers but worse power consumption. So it all depends on what you value most. At least that's how I took it.zubzer0 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Great review!If you have the time I would be wery happy if you test how well these boards do in Age of Conan DX10?
Some time ago you included (feb. 2009) Age of Conan in your reviews, but since then DX10 support was added to the game. I have yet to see an official review of the current graphics cards performance in AoC DX10.
Btw. With the addon "Rise of the godslayer" the graphics in the new Khitai zone are gorgeous!
konpyuuta_san - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
In my case (pun intended), the limiting factor is the physical size of the card. I've abandoned the ATX formats completely, going all out for mini-ITX (this one is Silverstone's sugo sg06). The king of ITX cases might still be the 460, but this is making me feel a bit sore about the 460 I'm just about to buy. Especially since the 6870 is actually only $20 more than the 6850 where I live and the 6850 is identically priced to the 460. There's just no way I can fit a 10.5 inch card into a 9 inch space. The 9 inch 6850 would fit, but there's a large radiator mounted on the front of the case, connected to a cpu water cooling block, that will interfere with the card. I've considered some crazy mods to the case, but those options just don't feel all that attractive. The GTX460 is a good quarter inch shorter and I'm getting a model with top-mounted power connectors so there's ample room for everything in this extremely packed little gaming box. I'm still kind of trying to find a way to put a 6850 in there (bangs and bucks and all that), which leads to my actual question, namely:The issue of rated power consumption; recommended minimum for the 460 is 450W (which I can support), but for the 6850 it's 500W (too much). How critical are those requirements? Does the 6850 really require a 500W supply? Despite having lower power consumption than the 460?! Or is that just to ensure the PSU can supply enough amps on whatever rail the card runs off? If my 450W SFF PSU can't supply the 6850, it really doesn't matter how much better or cheaper it is ....
joshua4000 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
let me get this straigt, fermi was once too expensive to manufacture due to its huge die and stuff but its striped down versions sell for less and outpace newley released amd cards (by a wide margin when looked at the 470)amds cheaper to manufacture cards (5xxx) on the other hand came in overpriced once the 460 had been released (if they havent been over priced all along...), still, the price did not drop to levels nvidia could not sell products without making a loss.
amd has optimised an already cheap product price wise, that does not outperforme the 470 or an oced 460 while at the same time selling for the same amount $.
considering manufacturing and pricing of the 4870 in its last days, i guess amd will still be making money out of those 6xxx when dropping the price by 75% msrp.
NA1NSXR - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Granted there have been a lot of advancements in the common feature set of today's cards and improvement in power/heat/noise, but the absolute 3D performance has been stagnant. I am surprised the competition was called alive and well in the final words section. I built my PC back in 7/2009 using a 4890 which cost $180 then. Priced according to the cards in question today, it would slot in roughly the same spot, meaning pretty much no performance improvement at all since then. Yes, I will repeat myself to ward off what is certainly coming - I know the 4890 is a pig (loud, noisy, power hungry) compared to the cards here. However, ignoring those factors 3D performance has barely budged in more than a year. Price drops on 5xxx was a massive disappointment for me. They never came in the way I thought was reasonable to expect after 4xxx. I am somewhat indifferent because in my own PC cycle I haven't been in the market for a card, but like I said before, disappointment in the general market and i wouldn't really agree with the statement that competition is alive and well, at least in any sense that is benefiting people who weight performance more heavily in criteria.