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****Official 6850/6870 Reviews thread****

Baboonanza said:
My take on it is that looking at just the performance here is misleading. The 6850 & 6870 aren't designed to win a performance war, they are designed to win a price war and are very suited to that purpose. They have amazingly small chips, are pin-compatible with Cypress (little board R&D, re-tooling or stock write-off cost) while being more-or-less competetive with all of Nvidia's offerings in the segment.

AMD have much more scope for dropping prices that Nvidia, who currently appear to have brought a knife to a gunfight, and judging prices at launch seems a bit pre-emptive to me. IMO AMD will have wanted to avoid the the pricing problems they had with Cypress, it's better to start high and drop the price than the other way around.
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Shhh! Sense has no place in the graphics sub forum! :D
 
I don't think Nvidia will be loosing much sleep until ATI try a price war, which wont start yet. Definitely a war that ATI will gain most b, but Nvidia can happily lower prices and make a small loss for a short period of time if need be.
 
Baboonanza said:
My take on it is that looking at just the performance here is misleading. The 6850 & 6870 aren't designed to win a performance war, they are designed to win a price war and are very suited to that purpose. They have amazingly small chips, are pin-compatible with Cypress (little board R&D, re-tooling or stock write-off cost) while being more-or-less competetive with all of Nvidia's offerings in the segment.

AMD have much more scope for dropping prices that Nvidia, who currently appear to have brought a knife to a gunfight, and judging prices at launch seems a bit pre-emptive to me. IMO AMD will have wanted to avoid the the pricing problems they had with Cypress, it's better to start high and drop the price than the other way around.
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One of the few balanced and well reasoned posts in this thread.

These 68xx cards aren't performance monsters and they aren't massively competitive yet, but ATI can easily drop prices when sales drop off.
 
I'm such an idiot when it comes to new hardware. Just placed an order with day 1 prices for 6870 to replace my.. 5850. I even managed to convince myself that the £25 cheaper GTX470 is not worth it.

Oh well. At least I get rid of my 5850 which has extremely noisy cooler and GPU temps up to 90C. Must be badly seated heatsink but I didn't dare to re-attach it because of warranty.
 
Without having to go through every review, that have been kindly linked to in the OP, do any of them have 6870 xfire results and/or overclocking with extra volts?
 
I admit I havent read ANY reviews yet....

But, the 6850 and 6870 look very underwhelming to me.

Have they outright blown the 460, 5850 and the 470 out the water in terms of price performance?

Doesnt look like it to me. The new cards just look like 5830 ish replacements.....

However! If these are 5830 class gpu's, then the highend will be pretty good indeed!
 
Also another to remeber, which Iv recently learnt.

Benchmarks are very unrepresentative of real world performance.

For proof, go through those reviews, ad im sure your find a good few contradictions.
 
Wow lots of reviews i've read just now

crossfire scaling seems very impressive

anyone else think the tests are a little hit and miss between all the various reviews i don't really see consistent patterns between the different sites some putting the 6000's leagues ahead of the 5000's and vice versa

we either have some very biased reviewers or some seriously dodgy test bench set-ups lol
 
Rroff said:
The fact is an OC on a GTX470 will massively change the story....
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of my final electric bill.

I mean seriously I value quietness and I don't want to listen to a fan blowing away trying to keep my overclocked video card from catching alight. I've had noisy cards before and they drive me up the wall (ATI have been guitly of noisy coolers as well BTW) and I've heard the GTX470 in action christ knows what it's like when o/c.

The more power it uses the more heat that's generated and the faster the fan has to spin to keep the card from falling over. The GTX470 is/was a decent card until yesterday but if your serious about overclocking you really ought to buy the Zotec AMP! edition or get the AMP! cooler and fit it yourself but at which point the card becomes to expensive.
 
Bleek said:
So if you have a 5850 like myself, are neither of these cards an upgrade?
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No not really 5850 and 5870 owners should be waiting for the 69**'s

these are mid range cards but to compete on price with nvidias offerings

tbh i do think price/performance is very competitve and can definately see nvidia shaking up their pricing in the coming weeks.

i'm seriously looking forward to 69** crossfire results later next month if these are anything to go by we should be looking at >70% over a 5970:eek:
 
I did read some where a while back, that AMD where going to rewrite the drivers from scratch for the 6000 series.

May just have been nonsense however...

Even if it was true, no idea if they would mean better driver for 5/4/3 series cards....
 
bigjimmyauk said:
Just a quick question considering these cards are officially out today how come AMD haven't updated their drivers page with any new drivers?
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Hmm good question.

I was gong to give a smart answer and say becuase of the time difference.... but these cards where released first in the states....

Anyway, im sure by tonight there will be some new drivers up.

AMD have released drivers on Thurdsays in the past, plus we have new cards out...
 
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