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.