MSI AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB Video Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
907 words · ~4 min read
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today's video review will be somewhat incomplete because I'm going to be
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uploading some of the segments as separate videos for example my power
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consumption video my heat video as well as my uh heat yeah heat is the same as
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temperature so I was going to say Fano video those ones are already up I also
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have already been working on a lot of other stuff to do with this card so you're going to see as many as like 8 to
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10 videos about the Radeon 6870 on my two channels but this is meant to be a
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general overview of the performance I will have boring graphs but I'm going to
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spoil the surprise a little bit the 6870 is not the highest end single GPU
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card now the reason for that is not
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known to me but for the last few Generations the 3870 the 4870 and the
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5870 have been the fastest single GPU
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cards from their Generations now we've had dual GPU cards which are faster so
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we've had a 387 X2 4870 X2 and 597
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but AMD is changing it with this generation they're changing the
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numbering scheme and they're also changing The Branding so instead of an
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at radon Graphics we're going to have AMD radon graphics and the numbering is
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going to be different so the 6870 is actually the price point replacement for
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a 5770 so that means that the 6870 is
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actually a little bit slower than the 5870 but that's still impressive because
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the 6870 cost a fraction of what the 5870 does it performs almost as well in
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many applications and when the tessellation really ramps up for example
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in the heaven Benchmark you're going to find out actually you might not see this
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but you'll see that the performance of the 6870 is equal to the 5870 and though
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I don't think I have the numbers in my graphs the minimum frame rate of the
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6870 is actually much better than the
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5870 so that's what's cool about it so the new price point the 6870 is an
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excellent replacement for the 5770 as long as you understand where it slots
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into the new AMD lineup so that means we're going to have 6900 series cards
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that are single GPU and are faster than the 6800
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Series so for the cards I tested the 6870 5870 5770 because those are the
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cards that in terms of performance it's very close to and that it's supposed to
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replace and then just for some context on the NVIDIA side I tested the GTX 460
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as well as the GTX 480 because the GTX
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460 is a bit of a lower-end refresh of a
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previous high-end card so it's um in some ways it's going to be the
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latest card from NVIDIA even though it's not the fastest so it should be the most
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comparable in terms of the architectural changes that they've been able to
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implement to get the best performance possible out of it so I used High
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graphical settings for all of these tests that means I'm using anti-aliasing
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an isotropic filtering and I'm turning all of the details way up in all of
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these games so stay tuned for boring charts and graphs and then the conclusion
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so for the street price this is one Rockin card because we're looking at
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about $249 upon release uh depending which brand you go with the one featured
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in my review today is the MSI Radeon
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6870 and honestly yeah I just got to say this
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thing is if you have $250 you want a direct X11 graphics card
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that's got all the latest features remember they've updated a lot of things
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from the 5870 feature-wise it's not just a performance boost this is an HDMI 1.4a
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port that means you've got support for Blu-ray 3D and we're also expecting a
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driver update for 3D gaming on this particular card okay you've got all the
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usual stuff which is audio over HDMI ifinity support two-way Crossfire
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support all of that cool stuff except you get this big tessellation
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performance increase you get 3D that is
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both in Blu-ray and in gaming and because of the way the inputs or rather
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outputs are spaced
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out you get four displays for ifinity so
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you can actually hook up two displays to either DVI or HDMI so that's sort of one
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group of two displays and then you can do two displays via the mini display
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port connectors so that's your clue the fact there's actually five connectors on
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the back of this video card that you can actually hook up more displays than you
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could on the last generation 5870 so you can see they've
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changed the layout somewhat they've replaced that single full-size display
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port port with too many DisplayPort ports if you want to see the card more
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up close check out my unboxing uh where I really show it from all the different
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angles and I talk a lot more about the features but I hope you've enjoyed this video review of the performance of the
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Radeon 6870