AMD has released their new Radeon HD 6800 family, so far comprised of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 models. Let’s review the standard Radeon HD 6870 from MSI (R6870-2PM2D1GD5), which follows the AMD reference design.

The name given by AMD to this new GPU family is misleading. Since 6800 is a number higher than 5800, users may think that the two members of this new family are faster than their counterparts from the Radeon HD 5800 family, namely the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870, which is not the case. As you can see in the table below, while members of the 6800 family run at a higher clock rate, they have a lower number of internal processors (shaders). This makes members of the 6800 family to be actually slower – but more affordable – than members of the 5800 family.

To compete with the new 6800 family, NVIDIA has reduced the price of their GPUs. After this price reduction, the new Radeon HD 6870 competes directly with the GeForce GTX 465 and indirectly with the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB, and, strangely enough, is in the same price range of the Radeon HD 5850. The Radeon HD 5870 is between USD 70 and USD 100 more expensive than the Radeon HD 6870.

Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review. All graphics chip listed above are DirectX 11 parts.

You can compare the specs of these video cards with other video cards by taking a look at our AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table and NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table tutorials. 

Now let’s take a complete look at this model from MSI.