HIS HD 6870 Turbo - Turbocharged 6870
We continue our bevy of Northern Islands articles by checking out the HIS HD 6870 Turbo, one of the first factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870 cards to hit the market.
Turbo Power
It’s been barely a week since the launch of AMD’s new Northern Islands series and HIS has already come up with a “Turbo” version of the Radeon HD 6870. If you are still new to Northern Islands, the Radeon HD 6870 is powered by the new Barts XT GPU, which is in fact a reworked and tweaked version of Cypress that powered the previous Evergreen series of graphics cards. The new chip offers greater performance per core and also excellent power efficiency. To find out more and to get up to speed on affairs, we suggest you check out our full review of the new Radeon HD 6800 series.
Those familiar with HIS will know that the “Turbo” suffix means that the card comes factory overclocked and the HIS HD 6870 Turbo is no different. Core clock speeds have been bumped up to 920MHz from 900MHz, whereas memory clock speeds up to 4480MHz DDR from 4200MHz DDR. The increases are modest, but it should still give us an noticeable boost in performance. So far so good, but while the card comes factory overclocked it still sports AMD’s reference cooler.
Here’s a look at the card.
Physically, there's no difference between the HIS HD 6870 Turbo (top) and a reference version of the Radeon HD 6870.
Two DVI ports, a single HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts ensure that the HIS HD 6870 Turbo is well provided for when it comes to video output options.
Two 6-pin PCIe power connectors are required to run this card and a decent PSU rated for 500W should be more than sufficient.
Test Setup and Results
To evaluate the HIS HD 6870 Turbo, we’ll be using our X58 setup with the following specifications:
- Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
- Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
- 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
- Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
- Windows 7 Ultimate
The key comparison here will be between the HIS HD 6870 Turbo and a reference Radeon HD 6870 as we are interested to find out how much of a boost the slightly uprated clock speeds of the HIS card can provide.
Since the basic performance of the Radeon HD 6870 SKU has been established in our original and we've also furthered that with a , we've decided to cutback on the number of tests for this card rather than running the usual suite of benchmarking tests. As such, we'll be testing only 3DMark Vantage, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. These games will give us a good idea of the card’s performance.
The list of cards tested and their driver versions:
- HIS HD 6870 Turbo 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.10)
- AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.10)
- ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.9)
- ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.9)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1280MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB GDDR3 (ForceWare 257.21)
The list of benchmark used are as follows:
- Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
- Crysis Warhead
- Far Cry 2
- Battlefield Bad Company 2
Results
Stock is Best
Expectedly, the HIS HD 6870 Turbo was slightly quicker than a bone stock Radeon HD 6870, but the advantage in performance wasn’t much. With its 20MHz bump on core clock speeds and 280MHz DDR increase in memory clock speeds, the HIS card was only about 3% quicker compared to a reference card. And we think most users would be hard pressed to notice the difference.
Elsewhere, power consumption figures are still comparable, although we noted that the factory overclocked HIS HD 6870 Turbo recorded slightly higher power readings while at load. Heat is a slight concern however, because with its maximum recorded temperature of 74 degrees Celsius, it is a good 4 degrees warmer than a stock Radeon HD 6870. It seems that HIS has done little in the way of optimizing the card to run cooler.
It's costlier than reference versions, but its added performance doesn't justify the premium pricing.
In terms of pricing, this lightly boosted card comes in at around US$269, a good US$30 more than bone stock Radeon HD 6870s, which, in our opinion, is not very good value for money. If outright performance is what you seek, then the US$30 extra you are paying for this card can net you a GeForce GTX 470, which is generally faster especially when tessellation comes into play. Furthermore, a 20MHz bump on core clock speeds is something we think most reference cards will have no difficulty to achieve, if you don't mind simple tinkering.
In the end, and at this price, the HIS HD 6870 Turbo should really have come with a custom cooler and more aggressive clock speeds to make it more appealing to gamers.
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