XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition Review

bishop245 , Geekspeak411 - May 1, 2011
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Testing:

Testing of the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition will require running the card through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors in order to gauge its performance. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX is disabled in the NVIDIA control panel when applicable. I will test the card at stock speeds and then overclocked to see how much additional performance is available and to determine if it can run with or faster than the current fastest single GPU cards on the market. Of course, all settings are left at defaults in the control panels of each respective manufacturer except where noted. I really want to see just how fast this card can fly!

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card: XFX HD 6870 Black Edition
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Cooler Master HAF 932

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked Settings:

XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition 1005MHz Core / 1245MHz Memory

Knowing that this card sat high on the binning order to begin with, I began overclocking in earnest with high expectations. I began at the stock clocks of 940MHz on the core and 1150MHz on the RAM. I first ratcheted the fan up to 100% through the Catalyst Control Center application and launched MSI’s Kombustor utility to warm up the card. After about 10 minutes, I ratcheted the core clock up 10MHz and let it sit for 5 minutes. No problems. I continued pushing until I maxed out the Catalyst software at 1000 MHz on the core and no signs of degradation or out of line temperatures. Wondering if I could go further, I pulled out Sapphire’s Trixx utility to see just how far I could go. I punched in 1010 MHz and the computer immediately froze, restarting and repeating the warm up process at 1000MHz, I tried 1005MHz: Success! I repeated the same process with the RAM maxing it out at 1245MHZ, with 1250MHz starting to show some artifacts on the screen. That impressive core clock puts this card at the very top of OCCs list for overclock ability by 5MHz. On the DDR5 side, the card ties up with the XFX HD 5870 as the leader of our tested cards at 1245MHz. Keep in mind that these numbers include no voltage tweaks or anything of the like, just pure overclocking prowess. Good show!

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Each card has been tested for its maximum stable clock speeds using MSI's Kombustor utility. So far my testing has shown that higher clock speeds may be stable in games where GPU usage does not reach 100%, but will crash within a few minutes using this utility. The reported clock speeds are those that proved stable over a 15 minute test at 1920 x 1200 8x AA.