HIS HD6870 CrossFireX Review

The HIS HD6870 is a capable card which is going to retail around £199 inc vat, a strong price point which puts it head to head against the faster overclocked GTX 460's on the market. We haven't given it an easy time today as it was in the ring with the eVGA GTX460 FTW and the MSI GTX460 Talon Attack, two of the fastest mid range cards on the market.

The HD6870 is a clear performance leader and some credit has to go to the AMD driver development team who have managed to achieve high levels of scaling under Crossfire conditions. In our testing the HIS HD6870 was always at the top of the pack, sometimes leading the way, and on occasion just slightly behind the overclocked GTX460 SLI configurations.

The only disappointment, and its not exclusive to HIS right now is the reference cooler used on the HD6870. Clearly HIS have noticed it is louder than they wanted as they have tweaked the fan settings to offer reduced noise levels at the expensive of slightly increased temperatures under load. We aren't complaining however because mid 80's (celcius) isnt a critical zone and we find it difficult listening to an Apache copter for a long period of time.

The HD6870 is pretty close to the limit, as our overclocking experiences were only moderate, achieving 50MHz more on the core. Memory overclocking was more positive, reaching a final figure of 1,150MHz (4,600MHz effective).

We like this card, the pricing is good and performance out of the box is killer. While it isn't breaking new performance records, it is able to handle overclocked GTX460's while offering excellent scaling in CrossFireX if you fancy an upgrade later. When compared to the HD5000 series the pricing really is hard to fault.

KitGuru says: An excellent card, great with DX9, DX10 and DX11 games. We're really looking forward to future solutions with improved, third party coolers.

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