Home › Product Finder › Graphics Cards

AMD ATI Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 PCIe

The AMD ATI Radeon HD 6870 measures 25cm long and weighs roughly 1kg. The GPU has been fabricated using the 40nm process, except it features 454 million less transistors than the Radeon HD 5870's Cypress XT core. This allowed AMD to shrink the die from 334mm2 to 255mm2, making the Radeon HD 6870 more fuel-efficient. The core is clocked at an impressive 900MHz, the HD 6870 has 1120 SPUs, 56 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Based on 22 reviews

Excellent:

12
Good:

9
Average:

0
Bad:

1

Pros

Fast, Decent cooler, Overclocking
Largely excellent midrange gaming performance. Improved technologies and video quality over previous-generation cards. Competitively priced.
Decent performance for the £200 class price, DX11 enhancements, new features, cool and low power draw at 150W top power.
Excellent mainstream DX11 graphics performance, Barts GPU Introduces stereoscopic 3D functionality, Reduced heat output enables nearly silent cooling fan, Fan exhausts all heated air outside of case, UVD3 Adds multiview CODEC for 3D Bluray playback.
Stellar general performance for the price, Great power efficiency.
Great gaming performance for the price; stereoscopic 3D support with compatible monitors and HDTVs; five ports makes connecting multiple monitors easier

Cons

Power hogYou can find more expert reviews of this card at testseek.com
Slightly less powerful than same-priced, overclocked competing cards. Only one dual-link DVI port.
Can't quite beat selected GTX460 overclocked parts, should have been named HD6860 as it's not faster than HD5870.
Limited initial AMD HD3D product support, Fails to fix anisotropic texture filtering, Barts GPU yields minimal overclock
Fledgling 3D support.
Doesn’t best Nvidia’s GTX 480 (or even AMD’s own previous-generation HD 5870); requires two six-pin power connectors; blocks adjacent slot

By TechSpot on October 22, 2010

Putting the new Radeon naming scheme aside, we'd like to focus more on the Radeon HD 6870's price and performance. The GeForce GTX 460 clearly got under AMD's skin, as the company created a product specifically to compete with it. At $239,...

-
By Channel Pro on January 23, 2012

What's in a name? We see if ATI's mid-range graphics card can dominate the marketRating: 4Average: 4 (1 vote) Since ATI last launched a new range of GPUs, the graphics worlds has a distinctly red tinge to it rather than the green we’ve...

80
By GamePro on April 28, 2011

Thee successor to AMD's popular Radeon HD 5850, the Radeon HD 6870 is the larger, more capable member of AMD's new 6800 series lineup. This midrange graphics card manages to outpace its closest relative--the Radeon HD 5850 --while doing minimal...

90
By XtremeComputing on January 25, 2011

If you came to this review hoping that the 6870 was going to bring market dominating performance back to AMD, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.AMD made it clear to us that the 6800 series are a refresh of the 5800 series, and...

-
By Gaming Nexus on January 24, 2011

Both the AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 offer great performance for the prices and being able to drive multiple displays with one card via DisplayPort is great. While these cards might not appeal to the enthusiast gamer, they still offer up...

92
By InsideHW on January 09, 2011

Computers with two or more graphics card are an interesting concept, one that has always intrigued enthusiasts. Ever since Voodoo 2, one of the most popular PCI 3D accelerators of all time, a dual graphics subsystem has been something that everyone is...

-
By DigitalVersus on December 23, 2010

A very good mid-end card, at easy with all video games. Note however that it has a misleading name: it is not a substitute for the brand's old...

100
By Rbmods.com on December 22, 2010

The 6870 is about 20$ more expensive than the 6850, and it also performs a tad better than the little brother (6850). I would seriously go for the 6870 if you've got the extra 20$ since it's worth it, you get a faster card that will perform a...

-
By BeHardware on December 05, 2010

the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 both consume a good deal less energy than the corresponding GeForces, thus...

-
By SilentPC Review on November 07, 2010

Gaming: Please check out gaming-oriented reviews of the HD 6870 at sites like like HardwareCanucks, The Tech Report, and AnandTech. The general consensus is that the HD 6870 performs somewhere in-between the HD 5850 and HD 5870 and is a much more...

-