Introduction

Last week, AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.

The HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo that we are reviewing today is an overclocked version of the regular HD 6870 reference design. At this time add-in-board partners are not allowed to make any changes to the PCB, components or thermal design of the HD 6870 so the possible changes are quite limited. In the case of the HIS HD 6870 Turbo, the core clock has been increased from 900 MHz to 920 MHz and the memory clock from 1050 MHz to 1120 MHz.

Packaging

The HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo uses the exact same package as the normal version, with the only difference being the sticker in the top right.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI adapter
• CrossFire Bridge
• 2x PCI-Express power adapter

The Card

The HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo is a complete implementation of the AMD reference design, which means that it uses the same PCB and cooler that all other HD 6870 cards use. The only exception here is the sticker, which is a HIS design.


AMD's reference design HD 6870 requires two slots in the system. It makes almost full use of the available height, so "breathing space" in a CrossFire configuration could be quite limited.


The card has two DVI ports, two mini-DisplayPorts and one HDMI port. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to two HD 6850 and HD 6870 cards in CrossFire for higher performance or improved image quality settings.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.