Conclusion

Today, AMD announced two new graphics cards – Radoen HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850. Both these cards are based on performance oriented Barts core, for the $150-250 price segment. The HD 6870’s MSRP stands at $239, whereas Europeans will have to pay €199 incl. VAT. The HD 6850’s MRSP stands at $179.99 in the US and about €150 in EU.

We received two cards for our testing – the reference XFX HD 6870 and custom designed XFX HD 6850 which retained reference clocks. XFX made sure that you know what card is in your system by launching a custom designed HD 6850 card with in-house cooling, 100% Japanese capacitors and a unique XFX backplate.

The XFX HD 6870 is selling at €199,-, while the HD 6850 has a price tag set at €150,-.

Performance wise, both the HD 6850 and HD 6870 seem like nice deals for those on the prowl for decent graphics cards.

Nvidia cut the pricing on their GTX 460 cards yesterday, so the GTX 460 768MB holds its own versus the HD 6850, while Radeon HD 6870 is priced about €45 higher than the GTX 460 1GB and meanwhile broke under the €150,- barrier.

Radeon HD 6850 does well versus Geforce GTX 460 768MB, whereas the HD 6870 outperformed the GTX 460 1GB. Our results unfortunately can’t give an exact answer to the performance comparison between the HD 6870 and HD 5850. Namely, we tested the HD 6800 series with Catalyst AI high quality texture filtering, which wasn’t be applied to HD 5800 cards so in our update we will introduce comparable results of Radeon cards.

Both XFX cards have proven to be good overclockers and the HD 6870 allowed us to hit more than 1GHz for the GPU and 930MHz with XFX’s custom designed HD 6850. The HD 6870’s GPU reference clock is 900MHz whereas HD 6850’s ticker runs at 775MHz.

All in all, AMD’s new cards have a good price-performance ratio, nice overclocking potential, improved performance per watt ration, HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2, Eyefinity support for up to 6 screens per card, improved tessellation, etc. So, such pricing, performance and potential make it virtually impossible for us not to recommend XFX’s HD 6870 or HD 6850 cards.