PCW: "The AMD HD 6870 is a worthy successor to the Radeon HD 5850. It offers a superior gaming performance, comparable power efficiency, and a lower price tag to boot."
BenchmarkReviews.com: The holiday season is fast approaching and there is still no official word on the next generation 28nm GPU's other than TSMC starting volume production. What does that mean? Well, it looks like we will be waiting until next year before any more new video cards from either camp are released. This stop gap between generations gives AIB partners a chance to tweak and perfect their designs and introduce some different models to keep the market active. Today Benchmark Reviews will be looking at the HIS Radeon HD6870 IceQ 1GB, a modern video card with a classic HIS design. As aftermarket designs go, this looks like a real beast of a card but there is no factory overclock on this model. The cooler is a mixture of the HIS IceQ X fin array and a shroud that looks similar to a reference card shroud with a twist. HIS have dubbed the radial fan a 'Black Hole Impeller' because it is able to draw in air from both sides as it is raised slightly from the PCB. The main question is what difference will this make to operating temperatures and overclocking potential; and that is exactly what we intend to find out.
AMD have today released Catalyst 11.2 drivers for ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards. The new drivers bring a number of enhancements and bug fixes. Gamers will be pleased to see the drivers bring performance increases for Call of Duty: Black Ops and Batman Arkham Asylum.
Hardware Heaven: Earlier in the week we took a look at NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580, their latest DirectX 11 graphics card which enters the market as replacement for the GTX 480. During that review we looked at the performance of the product at its reference speeds in single card and SLI mode, including 3-way. As a comparison we covered the GTX 480 and 5870 in single and dual card modes while touching briefly on the 6870 and 5970. There are of course numerous different versions of each product with manufacturers looking to differentiate their card from the competition and so today we felt it was worth looking at a slightly different comparison.
