Introduction
Last month, 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.
PowerColor's HD 6870 PCS+ is a custom HD 6870 design. It uses a different component selection on a very-close-to-reference PCB and changes the thermal solution compared to the AMD reference version. The most important points for the HD 6870 PCS+ are a clock speed of 940 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory, which is around 4.5% more on both core and memory.
| Radeon HD 5770 | GeForce GTX 460 | GeForce GTX 460 | Radeon HD 6850 | Radeon HD 5850 | GeForce GTX 470 | Radeon HD 6870 | PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 | Radeon HD 5870 | GeForce GTX 480 | Radeon HD 5970 |
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Shader units | 800 | 336 | 336 | 960 | 1440 | 448 | 1120 | 1120 | 1600 | 480 | 2x 1600 |
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ROPs | 16 | 24 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 40 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 48 | 2x 32 |
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GPU | Juniper | GF104 | GF104 | Barts | Cypress | GF100 | Barts | Barts | Cypress | GF100 | 2x Cypress |
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Transistors | 1040M | 1950M | 1950M | 1700M | 2154M | 3200M | 1700M | 1700M | 2154M | 3200M | 2x 2154M |
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Memory Size | 1024 MB | 768 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1280 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1536 MB | 2x 1024 MB |
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Memory Bus Width | 128 bit | 192 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 2x 256 bit |
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Core Clock | 850 MHz | 675 MHz | 675 MHz | 775 MHz | 725 MHz | 607 MHz | 900 MHz | 940 MHz | 850 MHz | 700 MHz | 725 MHz |
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Memory Clock | 1200 MHz | 900 MHz | 900 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1000 MHz | 837 MHz | 1050 MHz | 1100 MHz | 1200 MHz | 924 MHz | 1000 MHz |
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Price | $140 | $160 | $200 | $180 | $260 | $260 | $240 | $255 | $360 | $450 | $580 |
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