AMD Radeon HD 6870: Overclocked

The launch of Radeon HD 6870 last Friday was a quite anticipated release. People were curious about its performance when compared to NVIDIA’s current offerings, especially the GeForce GTX 460 1 GB that happens to be the direct opposition. Aside from that, it was also interesting to see where exactly the HD 6870 is positioned in terms of performance among AMD’s present lineups, the HD 5000 series Radeons in particular.

In our first Radeon HD 6870 article, we have discussed about its performance in general. The graphics card’s good enough and should be able to run the latest games without any problem, but maybe some people –us included- are still unsatisfied with it. Can we increase the speed a bit more? Of course we can! One of the easiest ways to do that is by applying some degree of overclocking, but before we move on to the steps, let’s examine the HD 6870’s standard specification first.

Specification

	AMD Radeon HD 6870	AMD Radeon HD 6850
Codename	Barts XT	Barts Pro
Fabrication Process	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	1.7 Billion	1.7 Billion
Die Size	225 mm2	225 mm2
Core Clock	900 MHz	775 MHz
Stream Processors	1120	960
Texture Units	56	48
ROPs	32	32
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Clock (effective)	4200 MHz	4000 MHz
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	11	11
Shader Model	5	5
Power Connectors	2x 6-pin	6-pin
Minimum Recommended Power Supply	500 Watt	500 Watt
Bus Support	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16