AMD Hardware Review Roundup
Friday, 03 December 2010 13:17
Written by Chris Tom
Legit Reviews-AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 6-Core Processor Performance ReviewSince the initial release of the Thuban series of AMD processors AMD hasn't made any changes to that line up. Well, fortunately for us that has now changed. Just recently AMD has introduced a new product to their already full line up. The AMD Phenom II X6 1075T is essentially a Phenom II X6 1055T with an increase in the multiplier. Instead of running at 200MHz with a x14 multiplier, the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T chugs along with a x15 multiplier. This gives the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T a final clock speed of 3.0GHz while the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T was trotting along at 2.8GHz. While it may not seem like a whole lot, every last megahertz helps performance.
RandBMods-XFX Radeon HD 4650 Graphics CardAMD recently released two new mid range videocards on to the market, named 6850 and 6870. These seem to be a good bang for the buck cards and by that I mean you should get alot of performance for a small amount of money. Will I be right or wrong? Lets find out how they perform in this review.
Hardware Heaven-XFX Radeon 6850 Black Edition (Dual Fans)Over the last month or so we have taken a look at numerous cards from the Radeon 6800 series. From the reference cards to enhanced models we have seen a number of different takes on AMDs solid base design. Like many of the other manufacturers XFX were quick to bring an enhanced card to the market, announcing their Black Edition early on in the 6800 lifecycle and producing a small number of cards based on the higher specifications. That card wasn't up to the standard we have come to expect from XFX though, essentially being an overclocked version of their reference card, so it was only a matter of time before they released a card which would stand out against competitor models.
Mad Shrimps-GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5670 reviewToday, however, we're looking at the GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5670 vga card. Nothing special about this card, apart from (reading from the box) enormous 80mm large fan, the golden (!) plated HDMI connector and to top it off: DX11 support.Oh, and it's also Windows 7 compatible. Actually, the card doesn't look that bad, as in 'I have seen worse'. It's not a real good looker, though ... but it's the inside that matters.
Bj3D-ASUS EAH6850 DIRECTCUWhen AMD released the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 in October 2010, they had their sights set on one thing: bringing out a contender capable of taking on the very successful Nvidia GeForce GTX 460. In order to do this, not only did the performance of the HD6800 cards have to be up to par, but the price point had to be within range of the 460. Now that the 6800 series cards have been out for a while, we're taking a closer look at ASUS' HD 6850 variant, the EAH6850 DirectCU. With their unique heatpipe cooling solution, DirectCU, ASUS claims their cards run up to 20% cooler than OEM style cooled cards. Come along as we see how things turn out as the benchmarks get under way.
Lost Circuits-ASUS EAH 6850 and 6870 Direct CuAlong with the die size and transistor count reduction came a power reduction. That is, the load power and the idle power of the R5850 and the R6870 are identical, however, the same power envelope allows to crank up the GPU core clock from 725 MHz to a whopping 900 MHz. As a result, whenever the cards are idle, the power consumption of the new design drops almost by 33%, or, conversely the older, Cypress-based R5850 had a 50% higher idle power consumption than the new Barts-based R6870. The wonderful world of math allows us to use either metric depending on what we want to show.
Overclockers Club-PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 PCS+ Call Of Duty Edition ReviewThe packaging of the PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ features a dark theme with a low profile high performance car on the front. The front lists several of the car's attributes, such as the four monitor Eyefinity support, connectivity options, the inclusion of the game Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, the amount of onboard memory and that this card is part of PowerColor's PCS+ series. The front profile of the card on the front panel looks eerily similar to the profile of the heatsink shroud. The back panel goes into more detail on the AMD specific technologies that this card supports or uses that include DirectX 11, AMD HD3D and CrossfireX.
PureOC-PowerColor Radeon PCS+ 6870What's unique about this PowerColor card is that it's not a reference heatsink; it's got a custom cooler and a healthy factory overclock as well, promising some great gaming horsepower with respectable temperatures and power consumption. And not only that, but it comes with a free copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 tossed in for good measure. Tasty.
Tweaktown-Intel Core i7 CPU Scaling with HD 6850 in CrossfireThe CPU limitation issue is a very real one and can’t be ignored. It’s ignorant to think that even more budget friendly setups like the HD 6850 in Crossfire aren’t going to be impacted by a CPU limitation, as at this price AMD really give us a huge amount of performance. There’s a few ways to combat a CPU limitation, though, and it’s not by just increasing your CPU speed. The idea is that you want to put more load on the video cards and this can be done really in three ways. Up the in-game detail up higher than what it was at previously is one. If that’s not an option, start to look at turning on AA and AF which really place a lot more pressure on your cards.
Legit Reviews-Acer Aspire 1551 11.6-inch Notebook Review - AMD Turion IISo is it the perfect compromise? I would have to say it's pretty darn close. Netbooks are plagued with slow system drives, slower CPU's, low amounts of memory, and long loading times for even the simplest of applications. You can also forget about gaming. On our Aspire 1551-5448 loading up Word and Excel were snappy enough. The AMD Turion II K625 CPU proved to be quite capable of handling anything you could reasonably expect a notebook to run. The addition of a quality SSD could really put the little Aspire over the top. At $499 it's a stretch for someone strictly on a netbook budget so adding an SSD would complicate that argument.
Metku-AMD HD 6850 & HD 6870These first HD6-series cards sit somewhere in the upper-mid range of the AMD's range of desktop graphics. With the launch of the new series, the product naming scheme has been changed and actually the HD6870 is supposed to replace the HD5850, rather than the HD5870. This change is a bit confusing and doesn't really help the consumer in comparing different models. These being the mid-range cards, there's also going to be a high-end range of HD69**-cards coming this year, but there's no word for the actual model names or specifications as of now.
Neoseeker-PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ ReviewThe HD 6850 was released alongside the HD 6870 just over a month ago and was part of the first wave of Northern Islands-based graphics cards to hit the market. Both of these new products used the Barts graphics processing unit, and for the most part included the same built-in architecture. The HD 6870 is built on the Barts XT core, which includes 1120 Stream processors and has a core clock speed of 900MHz. The HD 6870 was the more high-end of the two models launched, as the HD 6850 has a reduced amount of Stream processors, is clocked 775MHz and uses the Barts Pro GPU. The HD 6870 generated more excitement at launch, because in this industry the buzz tends to be built up around the most powerful product available. However, shortly after the HD 6800 series entered our labs, we found the HD 6850 was capable of reaching clock speeds in excess of the HD 6870, and due to the increased frequencies was able to greatly narrow the performance gap.
Overclock3D-Sapphire HD6850 TOXIC Edition ReviewSpecialist versions of graphics cards have been a little hit and miss over the years. Sometimes huge coolers and tiny overclocks have created over-priced cards with barely any performance improvement over their stock brethren. Others though, such as the TOXIC Editions from Sapphire that we're looking at today, have been consistently impressive. The last couple of HD6850s that we have reviewed have been good performers in stock trim, but rather disappointing when it came to either their ability to overclock, or the benfits that are to be gained from doing so.
OCModshop-VisionTek Killer HD 5770 First Look>IVisionTek Killer HD 5770 First Looknt.It's a video card. It's an audio card. It's a network card... and it leaps over MMOs in a single bound. VisionTek has combined forces with AMD and Bigfoot networks to deliver an all-inclusive gaming card that delivers nearly everything an enthusiast gamer could want.
ixbt-AMD Radeon HD 6850/6870 Graphics CardsAMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB performs similarly to or a bit slower than GeForce GTX 470. This upper mid-end product of AMD catches up with the lower high-end solution of NVIDIA. So, despite being a bit slower, Radeon HD 6870 also consumes less power, meaning that it's also cooler and quieter. Five interfaces are also a plus. If Radeon HD 6870 is cheaper than GeForce GTX 470, it will sell well.
Tbreak-ASUS EAH6870 ReviewAs the floodgates opened up for the AMD HD 6870 graphics card, ASUS also followed the market with the introduction of the EAH6870. Being ASUS, this card was not going to be released with just the reference settings, so while it looks the same as a factory AMD card, the EAH6870 in fact has two little surprises in store for us. The first is the full aluminum cover on the front of the card which dissipates heat much more efficiently than the reference card, and the EAH6870 comes with a miniscule overclock of 15MHz showing a Core Clock speed of 915MHz.
Techpowerup-PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ 1 GBLast month, AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.