XFX HD6870 Black Edition Crossfire Review

If you are in the market for a new high performance system for the latest games then there are certainly no shortage of graphics cards available. At the very high end of the spectrum, there is the GTX590 and the HD6990, which can set you back a staggering £650 and £525 respectively. Unless you have a substantial disposable income however these will prove to be just too expensive.

If you still demand killer gaming performance but want the cost overhead to be considerably less, then the review configuration today should surely be right at the top of your list. For less than £280 inc vat it is possible to buy two of the XFX HD6870 Black Editions for Crossfire. To sweeten the deal, Scan are selling them with the excellent Dirt 3 bundled.

Our testing has shown that two of these cards can often outperform the Nvidia GTX580, which will cost around £100 more, going by today's prices. There is also the capability of powering more screens with the AMD solution, which will appeal to a small audience.

So far it seems like a bit of a no brainer, but are there any downsides?

Firstly, it is worth pointing out that a Crossfire system is going to be totally dependent on AMD driver profiles. So if a new game is released and the driver team have yet to update their code, then you will be playing the game with a single card. AMD seem to be fairly active with profiles recently and offer CAP driver updates between driver releases, improving support. For instance, the current 11.6 set has a CAP3 update available over here which was released a couple of days ago.

To keep the cost down, XFX have opted for a standard cooler for these Black Edition cards, which means that noise levels are far from the best we have experienced. If you have sensitive ears then this wouldn't be the ideal purchase but at such a low initial outlay, the coolers could be replaced. While normally we would point out that a Black Edition card should really be shipped with a custom cooling solution, at this price they really are difficult to fault.

Pros:

• Price point is class leading
• Crossfire performance is superior to GTX580, which costs considerably more.
• Power consumption is excellent
• Free copy of Dirt 3 with Scan

Cons:

• Cooling solution is based around reference design.
• isn't quiet

Kitguru says: For less than £280 there really is nothing faster on the market.

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