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It has only been two short weeks since AMD launched their new mid-range HD6800 series, and in that time we here at Neoseeker have been able to examine products from Diamond, Sapphire as well the reference cards directly from AMD. Our previous reviews have shown both the HD 6870 and HD 6850 to perform equal to the retiring Cypress core, yet come priced substantially lower. In this review we continue our look at the 6800 series with the VisionTek HD 6870. This graphics card uses the reference specifications and cooling, which gives the VisionTek HD 6870 a GPU clock of 900MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory set at 1050MHz (4200MHz effective). This should allow the card to have all the great performance of the reference 6870, but it does come with VisionTek’s own accessories, packaging and best of all a lifetime warranty.
The mid-range graphics market is more competitive now than it has been in years, and it seems as if AMD and NVIDIA are releasing a new product almost every other week. However, AMD did have a six months head start when it came to getting DX11 products to the market, and as such have recently taken a large slice of the discrete graphics market. NVIDIA is hot on their heels though, and if recent rumors are true they should have an amazing product coming out in time to counter the upcoming Cayman release. That could shake up the high-end market, and lead to price cuts, which in turn give the consumers additional performance for a lower premium.
In this review we are going to run the VisionTek HD 6870 through our test-bed of games and benchmarks to see how it fits into the market. With reference specifications, the stock performance should be on par with other HD 6870’s we have looked at in previous reviews, but we will also be overclocking the card to see how well it performs with increased frequencies. The average HD 6870 has limited overclocking head room and most have capped out around the 970MHz mark, with a few limited exceptions being able to reach 1000MHz. It will be interesting to see how the VisionTek model overclocks and if it can reach that often elusive 1000MHz achievement.
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