XFX RADEON HD 6870 Black Edition Review

NVIDIA’s recent launch of the GeForce GTX 590 card has not changed the face of computing, as we know it but has brought improved performance at the highest end at $699. The vast majority of video card sales are not at the $500 price point, with around $200-300 being the “Sweet Spot” according to both AMD and NVIDIA and various market research firms like Gartner, Mercury Research and Jon Peddle.

AMD recently launched two new cards at that price point the RADEON HD 6870 and the RADEON HD 6850 cards at $239.99 and $179.99 respectively. While the HD 6850 is a good replacement for the HD 5750, the HD 6870 brings near the same performance of the HD 5870 which was AMD’s flagship card last year and is a worthy improvement over the HD 5770 which it replaces in the lineup.

XFX has already released a reference clocked HD 6870 which I reviewed recently. They usually release overclocked editions including their XT and XXX editions of the past. One of their flagship overclocked editions is called the Black Edition and today I’m reviewing the HD 6870 Black Edition card from XFX. As this card is overclocked it should provide a nice improvement in performance over the HD 6870 reference card.