Radeon HD 6850 & 6870 CrossfireX review

With the release of the series 6800 graphics cards obviously also comes Multi-GPU support. For those of you who have read the reference review, ya'll very likely noticed the photo's with the one CrossfireX connector on top of the card.
CrossfireX, it's a multi-GPU state which we'll cover a bit more in-depth on the next pages, pretty much you can utilize two or more graphics cards to work together and, hopefully, nearly double up on the game rendering performance.
As stated above, the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 only have one CrossfireX connector, this literally means that you can place only two cards into a multi-GPU setup. While you might feel merely two cards is a limitation, we think .. it's just fine. As always we do not recommend you to utilize more than two GPUs in a PC anyway as you'd quickly run into driver issues, increased power consumption, more heat in the PC to deal with and well .. it's just that the overall compatibility factor starts to increasingly get complicated once you opt 3 or 4-way CrossfireX multi-GPU setups

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Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC review

I think it was one day before the GTX 580 launched when we received an email from Gigabyte, "Hey Hilbert, would you guys like to review our new GeForce GTX 480 SOC edition?"
And I replied back, are you sure you did not mean GTX 580 ? And no, it was confirmed, Gigabyte has been working long and hard on a special edition of the GTX 480, the SOC, Super Overclock, version. A card with rather spectacular cooling, faster clocks and a card that should remain silent.
Puzzled whether or not I wanted to spend time on a product series that will go EOL I figured, well that factory overclock is immensely high for a GTX 480, if it performs roughly as well as the GTX 580 card, and if all other variables are right and if the price is right (just under the GTX 580) then Gigabyte definitely deserves at the very least a review on the product from our side.

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Geforce GTX 580 review

Lord of the Cards - The return of the king?
When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 480 in Q1 2010, their worst fears became reality. The high-end Fermi part was launched and then was gutted and slaughtered over three trivial aspects; those being high-power consumption, loud noise levels and a GPU that ran far too hot.
The flipside of that coin was the fact that the performance was actually spot on. To date the GeForce GTX 480 is the fastest kid on the DX11 block offering stunning performance. Yet the dark clouds that started hovering above the Fermi launch was something they never got rid of, up until the GeForce GTX 460 launch.
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AMD 6870 & 6850 New VGA Card

Setelah beberapa rumor dan bocoran mengenai seri kartu grafis terbaru dari AMD, akhirnya pada hari Kamis (21 Oktober) lalu, AMD resmi mengumumkan kehadiran dua seri kartu grafis terbarunya yaitu AMD Radeon HD 6870 dan HD 6850.

Meskipun menggunakan sistem penamaan yang mirip, namun ternyata Radeon HD 6870 dan HD 6850 tidak diposisikan untuk menggantikan langsung Radeon HD 5870 dan HD 5850 untuk kartu grafis kelas atas. Kedua seri kartu grafis baru ini malah ditujukan untuk kelas mainstream. Untuk kelas atasnya, AMD akan menyiapkan seri kartu grafis baru lagi dengan chip yang berbeda.

Spesifikasi lengkap AMD Radeon HD 6870 dan HD 6850 adalah sebagai berikut:

	Radeon HD 6870	Radeon HD 6850	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 4870
Stream Processors	1120	960	1600	1440	800
Texture Units	56	48	80	72	40
ROP	32	32	32	32	16
Core Clock	900MHz	775MHz	850MHz	725MHz	750MHz
Memory Clock	4200MHz	4000MHz	4800MHz	4000MHz	3600MHz
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Process	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm	55nm

Karena ditujukan sebagai kartu grafis kelas menengah, maka desain akhir AMD Radeon HD 6870 dan HD 6850 ini lebih kecil jika dibandingkan pendahulunya yang menggunakan chip grafis Cypress. Bahkan ukuran Radeon HD 6850 bisa dibilang cukup kompak untuk ukuran kartu grafis kelas mainstream.

Perbandingan fisik antara Radeon HD 5870, HD 6870, dan HD 6850

Dan untuk harganya, pada saat peluncurannya, AMD mematok kedua seri kartu grafis ini dengan harga yang cukup terjangkau. AMD Radeon HD 6870 memiliki harga US$239, sementara Radeon HD 6850 dipatok pada harga US$179.