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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Finally - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Thank God morons don't compare prices.Naming is irrelevant as long as you actually get more performance for half the price when the HD5850 was introduced.
softdrinkviking - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The fact that all of these people are complaining about the naming proves that it isn't irrelevant.Names are important to some people.
Not to you, clearly, but you're not everybody.
krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I was wondering before if Anandtech was going to use the overclocked 460 card. This day was a test for the new cards from AMD but it was more a test of Anandtech i my view.What a mess for the consumer, Anand and Ryan! - i know you must have discussed this.
- where does this lead to?
1. More agressive intervention from AMD and Nvidia on the review sites
2. More OC cards on the launch dates
This is not good for the transparancy for the consumer.
Therefore its a sad day. And i guess from your own writing, you dont feel quite comfortable about it yourself. Why the f... didnt you listen more to your own doubt?
- next time listen to yourself.
Otherwise a fine review - worth criticizing.
SandmanWN - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Exactly. If I were controlling the media for AMD I would start shipping out hand selected overclocked 5970's on every Nvidia review and demand they be used or no longer receive free review samples.Starting a bad trend here.
Mygaffer - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Other sites didn't bow to the pressure and include the OC'd gtx460. Guru3d is one that comes to mind. Not only that, but after admitting its your policy to not included them you include the very fastest OC'd gtx460 on the market?LAME. At least OC the 6850 so you can show that an OC'd 6850 beats an OC'd gtx460.
I've lost some respect for you with that decision.
AnnihilatorX - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The CF HD6850 seems to be quite a good value for high end users.They seem to have improved crossfire performance on this generation
A single HD5870 still retails at twice the price of HD6850
but 2 HD6850s are 50-70% faster than a single HD5870
MeanBruce - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Notice the idle noise levels within this comparative are all in the 40db range, with load noise in gaming mode up to the 50 and 60db range. Anyone interested in gaming or working in the 10db range? It is very possible, I am doing it now with an older ATI 4850, talk about peaceful computing and late night gaming. Yup add an uber-efficient aftermarket heatsink I have tried a few from Arctic Cooling and Thermalright, the best one so far is the MK-13 from Prolimatech! Clip on a Noctua NF-S12B uln fan 6db or a 140mm Noctua FLX attenuated to 10db and you are there baby! Total Upgrade Costs: $85. Peace of Mind: Priceless. Bruce out!Ryantju - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I used to play Crysis with HD 4830, which is not very good and I can't see the benchmarks. Since HD 4870's has such a outstanding Price/Performance, can it run Crysis 2?shiznit - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Anand I thought you tested the 5870 in WoW? The ugly texture transitions were blatantly obvious from the start. Imagine my dismay when upgrading from a 8800GT to a brand new just released 5870 and seeing worse texture filtering...Techman123 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I got my 5870 over a year ago and have been enjoying great frame-rates on my 30in monitor at 2560x1600. Even though it wasn't cheap, it has to have been one of the best buys I ever made, as this card is still one of the top tier of cards on the market. It's not often that a video card over a year old is still that competitive. Plus I have the option of adding a 2nd card once they are relegated to 2nd tier status.It is interesting the way they are introducing this card. With the 58xx series, they came out with the high end card first. It makes it seem that although the 6900 series will improve over the 5800 series, it won't be the huge step the 5800 was.