PowerColor is as always never late to arrive at the party, they submitted a Radeon HD 6850 for a test and as such we'd be more than happy to bring you a full review on one of their newest products today, the PCS+ version of the Radeon HD 6850.
The new mid-range series 6800 delivers a very decent chunk of gaming performance, a set of new features and, as always, will carry a nice price tag.
PowerColor has been busy though, merely a week or two after the official launch their 6850 range already has a non standard product with custom cooler, custom PCB and a totally non-reference design.
It's positioned in their PCS+ range and as such comes factory overclocked as well. Now remember, the R6850 is clocked at 775 MHz right? PowerColor clocks it at towards 820 MHz for you, and if you feel a little brave then apply some tweaks yourself as that will get you over 900 MHz quite easily. The memory as well, standard you'll need to work with a 4000 MHz (effective data rate) memory clock frequency PowerColor takes that to 4400 MHz on this product. And sure, there as well is some room left to fool around with tweaking wise.
Let's have a quick peek at the new duo and then head onwards into the review, where we'll cover the features, architecture, power consumption and heat levels.
Both cards released in the Radeon HD 6800 range are based on what is now know as the 'Barts' codenamed GPU. The cards deriving from it will in fact be segmented into mid-range, not high-end as many people expected. So yeah, the best has still to come. The reason? AMD needed to clean up some numbering as next year a lot of new products in the fusion line will eat away the lower segment of the numbering scheme.
The Radeon HD 6800 will segment itself in the mid-range market, whereas the Radeon HD 5800 series will be updated with the Radeon HD 6900 (Cayman) series, with a dual-GPU part named Radeon HD 6900 (Antilles), I can't say it often enough to make this clear I guess.
So that is certainly something to think about, as the naming scheme has changed. Also, why did AMD start with the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 and not 6900 you might ask. Well, obviously it's easier for AMD to release a slightly lower spec GPU but more importantly, currently the only product that really bothers AMD is NVIDIA's lovely GeForce GTX 460 (GF104). This is a very successful product for which AMD does not have a good answer, as such there's a gap in their product line-up and that gap needs to be filled up first.
Within it's own lineup the Radeon HD 6850 will be faster than the Radeon HD 5830 and the Radeon HD 6870 will be faster than the Radeon HD 5850, but not faster than the 5870 . The Radeon HD 6870 will be a pure reference product, while the Radeon HD 6850 will see many custom designs and boards. In the end it will be all about pricing of course.
Let's have a quick comparative overview of some of the specifications representing a certain cope of mid-range performance products
Specifications Radeon HD 5770 Radeon HD 5850 Radeon HD 6850 Radeon HD 6870
GPU Juniper XT Cypress Pro Barts Pro Barts XT
Manufact. tech. 40nm 40 nm 40nm 40nm
GPU frequency 850 MHz 725 MHz 775 MHz 900 MHz
Stream processors 800 1440 960 1120
Memory frequency 4800 MHz 4000 MHz 4000 MHz 4200 MHz
Memory bus 128-bit 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Memory buffer 1 GB GDDR5 1 GB GDDR5 1 GB GDDR5 1 GB GDDR5
Power consumption 108 watt 151 watt ~ 127 watt >150 watt
Performance - - Faster than 5830 Faster than 5850
So the two R6800 SKUs each have a separate codename, the R6850 being Barts Pro and the 6870 being the Barts XT. We'll leave the entire codename thing for what it is now and move a little onward into the architecture.
Both cards are of course updated DX11 class products with a couple of new features. Armed with 1.7 billion transistors the Radeon HD 6850 is pitted against the competition's GeForce GTX 460 768MB model, the 6850 which is clocked at 775 MHz on it's core and shader processors domain and comes with a full GB of graphics memory. This memory is 256-bit and running at an effective data-rate of 4000 MHz.
The product has 12 SIMD clusters, 48 texture units, 960 shader processors, 32 ROPs and a TDP of 127W, 19W in idle. Despite the memory bus, you can recognize similarities close to the R5770 here. This product however will bring you 1.5 TFLOPS of performance, and combined with that 256-bit gDDR5 memory it will leave the R5770 far behind it.
You guys will notice that the new 6800 series cards have a plethora of monitor connectors. Quite a bit has changed. The reference design cards will carry two mini Displayport (v1.2) connectors, one HDMI 1.4a connector and two DVI connectors of which one is single link, the other dual-link.
Display ports are now up-to snuff at revision v1.2 and that allows for a lot of extra bandwidth, in fact per connector you could drive up-to three monitors, so if you use both DP 1.2 connectors, up-to 6 monitors will be supported. Unfortunately that isn't all, connecting six monitors to two display port connectors will require an external breakout-box or monitors that supports daisy chain (very expensive). The external breakout-box I mentioned will be called a MST HUB (Multi Stream Transport), to date pricing and availability for that is unknown.
Of course you can configure Eyefinity as you please, through multiple monitors per DP connector, or one at a time with the help of the DVI connectors.
Lets have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed.
The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load.
Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 965/X58 based. This setup is overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). On average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.
Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is higher than your average system.
Measured power consumption
Advertised TDP = 127W
System in IDLE = 175W
System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 297W
Difference (GPU load) = 122 W
Add average IDLE wattage ~ 19W
Subjective calculated GPU power consumption = ~ 141 Watts
Recommended Power Supply
Here is power supply recommendation on the Radeon HD 6800 series:
Radeon HD 6850 - On your average system the card requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit.
Radeon HD 6870 - On your average system the card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit.
The PCS+ R6850 is a very potent product, in its baseline performance it already is a decent chunk faster than the reference 6850 products available on the market and there's some overclocking headroom left as well. Unfortunately PowerColor opted to use a non standard (Chill) Voltage management regulator IC that with current software availble on the market does not allow any voltage tweaking. So on that front the competition like MSI and even reference boards might go a notch higher.
The feature set itself is of course top notch. That improved feature set of course is grand with the new HD3D and UVD 3 update of the video processor. While capable, the HD3D implementation we feel is a loss 3D gaming wise. Pretty much what AMD is doing is saying, "here's a hardware capable product... and you guys do the rest". The complexity of finding the right TV/Monitor, glasses and then 3rd party software you need to buy is, in our vision, too complex for the generic end user without any guarantees that the 3D experience will work properly as it's not backed by AMD whatsoever. Time will tell though, we think that the complexity of a 3rd party for a lot of end-users will simply be complicated, making them choose the competition's solution as that's a handy straight out of the box kit alright. But sure, with the introduction of HD3D and HDMI 1.4a AMD also brings 3D Stereoscopic features towards the new 6000 series graphics cards, which is a welcome addition of course, yet requires optimal monitors and shutter glasses. As stated we do not like the complexity of the 3D gaming side at all, but watching movies and pictures in 3D is an easy to accomplish task.
Architecture wise, it merely improved the efficiency tweaks based of the last-gen architecture. There are no ground-breaking new designs aside from some feature updates. Price performance wise however you have noticed that the R6800 offers a truckload of value for money.
The cooler that PowerColor uses is very silent and brings in plenty cooling performance. The fact remains that we brought this card over 900 MHz on the core frequency without any temperature issues, is a statement all by itself and let's not forget the fact that this card comes factory clocked at faster frequencies offering more performance in it's baseline configuration over the reference products.
So the baseline performance of this product is grand... the cooling is just extremely silent, and all that can be purchased for roughly 179 USD. If you are not planning a massive overclock session with voltage tweaks, then we can wholeheartedly recommend this product. PowerColor tops it off with a free game as well, included is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Agreed, COD Black Ops would have been nicer of course, but still this bundle offers great performance for any modern game at a very fair price.
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