ASUS HD6870 Crossfire EXCLUSIVE Review

ASUS HD6870 Crossfire Review

Introduction

As mentioned in todays other review of the HD6870 it is intended as a replacement for the HD5830, although with increased performance using less silicon.

With an expected retail price of around £200 we just couldn’t resist taking the ASUS version for a test drive. A 15MHz overclock on the core doesn’t sound a lot, but it might just be enough to tip it over the edge.

For those of you who’ve followed us for a while you’ll know how much we love getting the maximum performance possible for the lowest relative outlay. With the 5 series of ATI Radeon cards the deal was very similar as the one we saw with the 4 series, namely that two mid-range cards in Crossfire can outperform a similarly priced high-end card. With the 5 and 4 series that both consisted of the 5770 and 4770 respectively in Crossfire.

Thanks to the bizarre decision to keep the saming numbers but adjust where they fit in the scheme of things, it means that the closest we can get to it with the 6 series is two HD6870s in Crossfire. Naturally we couldn’t wait to see if the trend has continued.

Technical Specifications

The ASUS version of the HD6870 is almost identical to the reference one except for a small 15MHz boost on the core speed.

Process 40nm
Transistors 1.7 Billion
Core Clock 915 MHz
Stream Processors 1120
Performance 2.0 TFLOPs
Texture Units 56
Texture Fillrate 50.4 GTexel/s
ROPs 32
Memory Type GDDR5
Memory Clock 1050 MHz
Memory Bandwidth 134.4 Gbps
Idle Power Draw 19w
Release Data 22 October 2010

Let’s have a look at the pictures.