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The cards ship with the higher clocks and are fully supported by the manufacturer.) Today, we’re looking at a couple of hot-clocked cards, both hailing from XFX.īehold, the XFX Double D HD 7870 Black Edition and Double D HD 7850 Black Edition: (Such cards are sometimes referred to as “overclocked in the box,” but that’s a bit of a misnomer, since no overclocking actually takes place. Unsurprisingly, board makers have jumped on the opportunity to serve up customized, higher-clocked versions of the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850. Those settings yielded substantial performance gains without huge increases in power consumption. We were able to overclock its memory from 1200MHz to 1375MHz, as well. Our reference Radeon HD 7870, which came to us directly from AMD, had no trouble climbing from its stock 1000MHz clock speed all the way up to a blistering 1275MHz.
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One of those advantages is a rather substantial amount of overclocking headroom. The new Radeons therefore have to play up their other advantages in order to seduce prospective buyers. In a nutshell, the 7800-series Radeons deliver only slightly better performance per dollar than the prior-gen Radeon HD 6900 cards, though they have the potential to be much cheaper. Nvidia charges a pretty penny for its freshly released GeForce GTX 680, too, which has a smaller GPU and the same memory interface width as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti yet sells for twice as much. Whispers around the industry suggest the higher prices can be attributed the limited supply of 28-nm wafers coming from TSMC, the Taiwanese foundry that manufactures chips for AMD, Nvidia, and other firms like Qualcomm.
Xfx radeon hd 6850 double d series#
Unfortunately for bargain hunters, AMD has priced the Radeon HD 78 at $249 and $349, respectively, well above the $180-240 price range the 6800 series occupied when it arrived in October 2010. Thanks to a new 28-nm chip fabrication process and a revised graphics architecture, dubbed GCN, they even outpace the old Radeon HD 6900 series cards, which are based on larger chips. The newcomers are quite a bit faster, too.
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In that initial encounter, we learned that these cards have all the makings of successors to the popular Radeon HD 6800 series: similar-sized GPUs and memory interfaces, with lower power requirements.
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We studied them, and the Pitcairn graphics processors that dwell within them, about three weeks ago. You'll probably find them for a little more at retail, but a pair of these for just over £200 will give similar performance to a pair of HD 6870s, which are based on similar architecture.īut they won't be around forever, and since the price drop, these HD 6870s have become much more impressive little graphics cards.We’re already well acquainted with AMD’s Radeon HD 78 graphics cards.
Xfx radeon hd 6850 double d pro#
It's bought up AMD's stock of the Cypress PRO GPUs and is producing HD 5850s as a limited edition £100 card. One little fly in the ointment, though, and an issue for pretty much all the cards down at this end of the spectrum, is that Sapphire is releasing the last hurrah of the HD 5850. It will also mean that anyone who already has one of these in their rigs isn't necessarily going to have to throw out the GPU with the bathwater. With just about everyone with a vaguely modern, standard-size mainboard able to put in a second AMD card in CrossFire, that makes this lower-end HD 6870 a rather interesting prospect in multi-GPU terms. With two of these Southern Island cards in unison, you're still saving almost £50 compared with a single GTX 580, will be nearing similar speeds and, in some cases, getting better performance.Īgain that Metro 2033 hi-res bench dropped it to completely unplayable levels, just scraping 2fps, but the pairing had the win across the rest of the suite.Īliens vs. It really does give the GTX 560 Ti more cause for concern, being cheaper and almost as quick, and that's just as true when you factor in CrossFire.