New Technology Reviews!.: Radeon

AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 launch assault on enthusiast gaming market

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31f5hQFX4o_AaG9_G3tmjtqeNACjYKkoZgW4Wwp6j-f7NuCuUKafmCqsh_iejr36TyDC_CwdP8vAmGLCWNRI5OLbkPt1M0TwcF-CsHrQvDX2BXXnj7KHHqzRyVuPYh71YbB8Sdsp62to/s1600/10x1215nub3radeon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31f5hQFX4o_AaG9_G3tmjtqeNACjYKkoZgW4Wwp6j-f7NuCuUKafmCqsh_iejr36TyDC_CwdP8vAmGLCWNRI5OLbkPt1M0TwcF-CsHrQvDX2BXXnj7KHHqzRyVuPYh71YbB8Sdsp62to/s320/10x1215nub3radeon.jpg" width="320"></a></div> 
It's taken AMD a long time to refresh the top end of its graphics hardware, but today's culmination to that wait has to be described as somewhat bittersweet. Sweet, because we're finally getting a successor to the venerable HD 5870, one that offers improved power management and tessellation performance at a lower $369 price point, but also bitter because in terms of sheer firepower, the Radeon series doesn't seem to have made quite the leap many of us had hoped for.

AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 launch assault on enthusiast gaming market

It's taken AMD a long time to refresh the top end of its graphics hardware, but today's culmination to that wait has to be describe...

Review: AMD Radeon HD 6950

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/TechRadar/Computing/Components/AMD%20Radeon%20HD%206950/HD%206950b-200-200.jpg"> <IFRAME style="PADDING-RIGHT: 10px; WIDTH: 131px; PADDING-TOP: 5px; HEIGHT: 245px" align=right marginWidth=0 marginHeight=0 src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=latesttecompu-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B004FPYL92&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" frameBorder=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME>Christmas time means pressie buying time means new graphics card time. Especially if your new graphics cards have been delayed as long as the AMD Radeon HD 6950 has. We've already looked at its big brother, the AMD Radeon HD 6970. Despite some impressive performance improvements over the previous AMD generation, the combination of a relatively high price and the fact it still loses out speed-wise compared with the similarly-priced Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 means it can't be recommended over the competition. The Cayman GPU, which powers both the Radeon HD 6970 and the Radeon HD 6950, has been fairly heavily delayed since its proposed launch some months ago. We were expecting big things from it and the longer it's been delayed the more concerned we've become about its final performance. Like AMD, we were hoping for a new single-GPU graphics king in the HD 6970, but the advanced launch of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 scuppered that, and the GTX 570 has only hammered more nails into the top-end AMD card's coffin. The other difficulty for the Radeon HD 6970, and the reason it failed to garner a particularly good review score, is the fact it was released alongside this very card we're looking at here. And the Radeon HD 6950 is a much better value proposition, and as such a much better card. <img alt="AMD radeon hd 6950" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/TechRadar/Computing/Components/AMD%20Radeon%20HD%206950/HD%206950c-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> The Radeon HD 6950 may lose out in the DirectX 10 benchmarks, but the card's performance at DirectX 11, especially at 2560x1600, is thoroughly impressive. The fact it is so close to its big brother, the Radeon HD 6970, in performance and architectural terms means that there's little reason to go for the more expensive Cayman card. We'll check out the overclocking performance soon too, but I would expect that gap to be very quickly closed down. <H4>DirectX 11 Tessellation performance</H4> Heaven: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 19.5 HD 6970 – 21.7 GTX 570 – 22 <H4>DirectX 11 Gaming performance</H4> Metro 2033: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 12 HD 6970 – 13 GTX 570 – 3 DiRT 2: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 51 HD 6970 – 55 GTX 570 – 64 Lost Planet 2: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 23 HD 6970 – 25 GTX 570 – 32 Aliens v. Predator: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 22 HD 6970 – 25 GTX 570 – 22 <H4>DirectX 10 gaming performance</H4> Just Cause 2: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 27 HD 6970 – 30 GTX 570 - 30 Crysis Warhead: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 18 HD 6970 – 20 GTX 570 – 25 Far Cry 2: FPS – higher is better HD 6950 – 60 HD 6970 – 65 GTX 570 – 66 <img alt="AMD radeon hd 6950" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/TechRadar/Computing/Components/AMD%20Radeon%20HD%206950/HD%206950a-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> In performance terms the Radeon HD 6950 is a rather impressive beast. Considering it's around £80 cheaper than the Radeon HD 6970, and you're only losing a couple of frames per second on most of the benchmarks, that makes it doubly so. With the two cards released at the same time it makes the HD 6970 almost impossible to recommend. The pricing also puts the HD 6950 in its own little niche. At £220 it's slightly more expensive than the top-end, overclocked GeForce GTX 470s such as the MSI Twin Frozr, but manages more impressive scores at the higher resolutions, especially in DirectX 11 games and applications. Thanks to the 2GB frame buffer the HD 6950 shares with the HD 6970, as well as the high ROPs count, this card can deliver quality gaming performance across the board. Looking at the particularly tessellation-heavy benchmarks of Heaven and Metro 2033 the HD 6950 is knocking on the door of the GTX 570 too. Quite what AMD is doing releasing two incredibly similar cards at such disparate price points I don't know. The Radeon HD 6950 is hardly losing anything architecturally compared with the HD 6970. All you miss out on is two of the redesigned SIMD units and a shade lower clockspeeds. With a little judicious overclocking I'm fairly positive we'd be able to garner identical scores as the HD 6970 with this card. Saving £80 in the process. As well as having incredibly similar performance figures the cheaper Radeon HD 6950 also has less energy overheads. In terms of total system draw from the wall I was looking at around 330w for the HD 6970 with around 260w for the HD 6950. So even if it's just a few pence here and there, plumping for the cheaper card will also save you cash in the long run. If I was looking to spend around £300 on a card I would still be looking at Nvidia's GeForce GTX 570. It's got on average superior benchmark scores and while AMD has aggressively dropped the expected price of the HD 6970 to match it I wouldn't be surprised to see Nvidia fighting back on that score too. But if I was looking at spending a little less then that Radeon HD 6950 is the next step down. It's far cheaper than both the GTX 570 and the Radeon HD 6970, but is so close in performance you'd scarcely be able to tell with the naked eye. <H4>We liked</H4> Being able to spit out performance at almost the same levels as a £300 card is darned impressive for a card this close to £200. Admittedly if we had the cash we'd go for the GTX 570, but this is definitely the next card down. The 2GB frame buffer means that this is a mid-range card that can compete at the higher end of the resolution spectrum. <H4>We disliked</H4> There's unsurprisingly very little to dislike about this Cayman card; it's pretty big and that's about as negative as I can get!

Review: AMD Radeon HD 6950

Christmas time means pressie buying time means new graphics card time. Especially if your new graphics cards have been delayed as long as t...

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Review

<div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/TechRadar/Computing/Components/Sapphire%20HD%206850/Sapphire%20HD%206850%20Toxic%201-200-200.jpg"></div><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=latesttecompu-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B0047ZGIUK&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>The vanilla Radeon HD 6850 was the more relevant of the two latest AMD cards, but can Sapphire's HD 6850 Toxic edition make it exciting too? 
There's one thing you can't criticise Sapphire's Toxic series of overclocked graphics cards for: they never look dull. Each new variant features a visually (and thermally) different heatsink. From the three fanned enormity of the HD 5970 Toxic to the matt black angular edges of this HD 6850 Toxic, they're rarely the same twice. 
Not only does the HD 6850 Toxic look classier than most graphics cards, it sounds a lot better too, in that it's almost silent. The GPU is clocked at 820MHz, which represents a healthy 45MHz more than the reference design – and yet cooling is noiseless, and there's plenty of headroom to push the card harder if you wish.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Review

The vanilla Radeon HD 6850 was the more relevant of the two latest AMD cards, but can Sapphire's HD 6850 Toxic edition make it exciting ...

Review: HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/TechRadar/Computing/Components/HD6870FanTurbo-200-200.jpg" /></div> 
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div> 
 
<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=latesttecompu-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B0047N0XBW&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>From the outside, there isn't a lot to distinguish the HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo from a reference model of the HD 6870. 
There's a new heatsink slapped over the top of the enormous double slot card which, like all HD 6870s, requires two extra power connectors and will take up any spare room you have in your case. 
Other than that, though, it has the same five outputs which – excitingly, for fans of the third dimension – includes support for technologies such as Blu-ray 3D via HDMI 1.4. 
The Turbo suffix signifies, of course, that this is a factory-overclocked version of the HD 6870. 
For the moderate price increase of around £10 over, say, the stock-clocked Sapphire HD 6870, there's a correspondingly moderate acceleration of the core clock speed from 900MHz to 920MHz with another 50MHz tacked onto the memory speed for luck. 
<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=latesttecompu-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B0047ZH7FU&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>With a card as big and complex as the HD 6870 is, can such a relatively small change make much of a difference? 
While we tested the cards below at a variety of resolutions and image quality settings, the most overwhelmingly important scores are at the default resolution for most monitors, 1920 x 1080 with 4xAA. These are shown below, except for in the Heaven 2.2 benchmark, which was run without anti-aliasing in this instance. 
DiRT 2 
HIS HD 6870 Turbo: 95.03fps 
Radeon HD 6870 (stock): 92.54fps 
Asus EAH 6870 OC: 92.33fps 
Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic: 86.25fps 
Far Cry 2 
HIS HD 6870 Turbo: 84.9fps 
Radeon HD 6870 (stock): 82.52fps 
Asus EAH 6870 OC: 83.13fps 
Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic: 75.27fps 
Heaven 2.1 
HIS HD 6870 Turbo: 56.5fps 
Radeon HD 6870 (stock): 53.3fps 
Asus EAH 6870 OC: 54.7fps 
Sapphire HD 6850 TOXIC: 50.8fps 
Just Cause 2 
HIS HD 6870 Turbo: 50.56fps 
Radeon HD 6870 (stock): 48.68fps 
Asus EAH 6870 OC: 49.14fps 
Sapphire HD 6850 TOXIC: 45.27fps 
When AMD's Radeon HD 6870 landed back in August, we weren't overly impressed with its performance for the price. 
Sandwiched between Nvidia's extraordinarily wallet-friendly GTX 460 cards and its more powerful predecessor, the HD 5870, our advice was to ignore the relatively minor changes in the core architecture that the HD 6870 introduced over older cards and hang on to see what the new Cayman GPU brings later in 2011. 
That advice doesn't change. 
If you thought a clock speed increase of just over two per cent wouldn't make much difference to a card which already appears more limited by a reduction in the number of processing cores and texture units over the previous generation than by hertz alone, you'd be right. 
At the resolutions we'd expect it to be used at – 1920 x 1080 with 4xAA – the difference is minimal. 
The new heatsink is quiet and allowed us to overclock as far as 950MHz, but if you really want to manually tweak things further you'll be looking for something like the Asus HD 6870 OC edition, which offers much more control over BIOS voltages. 
The real problem, though, is that since the launch of the HD6870, prices for everything have dropped through the floor. 
Both the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 and the Radeon HD 5870 are faster chips than any amount of overclocking will make the HD 6870, and they can both be found for less than £200. 
If you must upgrade now, grab one of those. Otherwise save your pennies and see what Cayman brings at marginally higher price points instead. 
We liked 
A small overclock to the core speed and the support for HDMI 1.4 and 3D goodness, plus a decent amount of headroom for pushing the card further. 
We disliked 
Not enough of a default tweak to make much difference at the kinds of resolutions you'll use it with. The biggest problem, however, is that falling prices of Nvidia GTX 470s and Radeon HD5870s mean you can get an awful lot more performance for substantially less cash.

Review: HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo

From the outside, there isn't a lot to distinguish the HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo from a reference model of the HD 6870. There's ...

How to Install a Radeon X1300

<ADDRESS class="Note byline"> <a title="#jsArticleIntroImageCredit rel=thinbox></A>The Radeon X1300 fits in your motherboard's PCI express slot.Fotolia.com</A>">ATI's Radeon X1300 is a desktop graphics adapter that fits into the motherboard's PCI express slot. It features video memory of 256 MB and a clock speed of 450 MHz. The graphics card has both DVI and S-Video outputs, but no VGA output. It supports a maximum screen resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. Installing the card should not take much longer than 10 minutes. Difficulty:EasyInstructions1 Unplug all cables from your PC. Rest the PC on its side on a flat surface. Unscrew and slide off the side panel.2 Locate your current graphics card. This will either be in the AGP slot or, if it's a more modern graphics card, a PCI express slot. Remove your old graphics card if you have one. If necessary, unscrew it from the tower unit, otherwise, you could damage the motherboard when you try to pull it out.3 Push the ATI Radeon X1300 into the PCI express slot until it is firmly in place. Screw it into the back panel of the tower unit to secure it in place.4 Replace the side panel of your PC and replace all the cables. For now, insert your video output cable into your motherboard's DVI port. Turn on your PC.5 Install the drivers and software for your Radeon X1300. If your graphics card did not come with a software CD, you can download the drivers from the AMD website. (See Resources.) You will probably have to restart your <A" href="">computer</A> once you have installed the drivers.6 Remove the video output cable from your onboard output port and insert it into the DVI port of the Radeon X1300. Go to the Start menu and click the Control Panel to adjust your display settings. Set the screen resolution to match the highest that both your monitor and the X1300 will support.Tips & Warnings Ensure that your monitor supports DVI input before installing the X1300, as it does not include a VGA output. If you previously had a graphics card installed on your computer, you may have to uninstall its drivers before fitting the X1300</ADDRESS>

How to Install a Radeon X1300

The Radeon X1300 fits in your motherboard's PCI express slot.Fotolia.com ">ATI's Radeon X1300 is a desktop graphics adapter ...

AMD announces two new Radeon mobile GPUs

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//classifications/computing/upgrades-and-peripherals/graphics-and-multimedia/images/amd-ati-logos-200-200.jpg"> AMD is going to be springing two new series of mobile graphics processors on the market, the Radeon HD 6500M and the HD 6300M. The 6500M is pitched to the top end of the market, for people with multimedia and gaming laptops who need speed, and it offers a processor clock speed between 500MHz and 650MHz with a GDDR5 or DDR3 memory clock speed of 900MHz. This top of the line processor boasts 400 stream processing units, 20 texture units, 8 colour ROP units and 32 Z/Stencil ROP nits, pretty nifty by anyone's standards, as it should be, being based on the TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture Mid-range mobility For those who find that a bit too high powered AMD will also have the HD 6300M, a slightly stripped-down version that's geared to the mid-range market. It can only support DDR3 memory interface, and the memory clock speed is 800-900MHz with a processor clock speed of 500-700MHz. There are plenty of eye-watering features, such as AMD's famous Eyefinity multi-display technology – with the 6500M you can have up to six simultaneous displays (but only four for the 6300M) – and AMD HD3D and Direct X11. There's no release date or price for either of these as yet.

AMD announces two new Radeon mobile GPUs

AMD is going to be springing two new series of mobile graphics processors on the market, the Radeon HD 6500M and the HD 6300M. The 6500M is ...

Review: XFX Radeon HD 5750 XXX

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/TechRadar/Computing/Components/november%20components/XFX%20HD%205750%20XX-200-200.jpg"> Factory-overclocked 3D cards, such as the XFX Radeon HD 5750 XXX, are a pretty common next step for most manufacturers when a GPU starts maturing, and it's no surprise. When your fabs have cranked out squillions of chips, the price-war between stock cards has stabilised and a new generation of cards is peeping over the horizon, there's the natural drive to differentiate and offer a little more performance to keep the GPU attractive. That's exactly what this BIOS-tweaked version of the HD 5750 core is all about. 50MHz up on the core and 500MHz up on the RAM, it's an on-paper performance-hike for the puppy in AMD's midrange, DX11-capable midrange litter. But contrary to expectations, the cooler has slimmed down from the dual-slot reference design to a single slot, making this an attractive little card for SFF and HTPC systems. Sadly, this leaves little room for an HDMI slot, so the video-out options are reduced to dual DVIs and a single display port. So just who is this card aimed at? Far Cry 2 Low (1680x1050, x4aa x8AF) HD 5750: 52.7 GTS 450: 66.5 XFX HD 5750 XXX: 54.57 HD 5750 CF: 98.1 GTS 450 SLI: 124.94 Far Cry 2 High (1920x1080, x8aa, x16AF) HD 5750: 38.5 GTS 450: 51.8 XFX HD 5750 XXX: 41.67 HD 5750 CF: 54.9 GTS 450 SLI: 99.6 Just Cause 2 Low (1680x1050, x4aa x8AF) HD 5750: 38.8 GTS 450: 30.1 XFX HD 5750 XXX: 39.9 HD 5750 CF: 57.9 GTS 450 SLI: 57.6 Just Cause 2 High (1920x1080, x8aa, x16AF) HD 5750: 21.4 GTS 450: 17.6 XFX HD 5750 XXX: 21.8 HD 5750 CF: 37.8 GTS 450 SLI: 29.1 Heaven 2.0 Low (1680x1050, x4aa x8AF, medium Tesselation) HD 5750: 16.1 GTS 450: 20.7 XFX HD 5750 XXX: 21.8 HD 5750 CF: 30.8 GTS 450 SLI: 40.1 Heaven 2.0 High (1920x1080, x8aa, x16AF, extreme Tesselation) HD 5750: 7.7 GTS 450: 10.5 XFX HD 5750 XXX: 8.8 HD 5750 CF: 12.3 GTS 450 SLI: 20.1 Against the stock 5750, XFX's HD 5750 XXX is a clear improvement… by one frame per second in pretty much every game. For a £5 premium over the average 5750, it's hardly a stretch for the wallet, but difficult to justify. However, if you want to play games at medium to high resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering cranked up to the nines, you're shopping on the wrong shelf. And don't make the mistake of assuming that because this is a DX11-ready card, you'll see the benefits in gaming. Tessellation, the headline gaming-visuals feature, is pretty demanding, and a single 5750 just won't cut it at any kind of tasty framerate. Its performance makes it more suited to media centre systems, and the single-slot design means it's perfect for a dinky chassis. The only problem that leaves us with is the lack of an HDMI port, which is a dog-gone necessity for media-centre systems. Which leaves us… where? Sort of halfway to something, but that conundrum is solved by the addition of a second identical card. In CrossFireX, you see major performance gains with these cards, and excellent DX11-supporting midrange performance at less than £200 shouldn't be sniffed at. However, there's a clear winner in the sub-£100 3D card market at the moment, and it's Nvidia's GTS 450. It outperforms ATI's competing crop of 5750 cards in most gaming tests, and when you pop a couple in your system for SLI dual-card kicks, they outperform their sub £200 price-tag like a pair of glue-fuelled X-Factor hopefuls. Until these HD 5750s see a considerable price-drop, the GTS 450 is where you should wave your wallet. We liked Elegant, quiet, and happiest at lower resolutions, it's a decent budget gaming card for small systems. The single-slot design is a welcome reduction in real-estate from the stock twin-slotter 5850s, and that smaller cooler doesn't bother the GPU in the slightest. We disliked The lack of an HDMI port doesn't completely ruin it for media-centre systems, but it certainly doesn't help matters. We'd prefer to see an HDMI and a single DVI, rather than dual DVIs. In terms of gaming performance, there's little to write home about over the stock 5750.

Review: XFX Radeon HD 5750 XXX

Factory-overclocked 3D cards, such as the XFX Radeon HD 5750 XXX, are a pretty common next step for most manufacturers when a GPU starts ma...