Gigabyte 6850 vs 5870 - performance vs price analysis

[youngpro]

Gigabyte 6850 vs 5870 - performance vs price comparison





These GPU's are not even in the same class, why compare them? New generation card, should be capable of higher FPS.. But the 6850 isn't exactually new generation card, in fact it probably fits in between the 5770 and 5850 somewhere, it is BUDGET GAMING, where as the 5870 is straight up power.

AMD has released the 6850 for one reason, it is this budget gaming sector. For a while now the 460 has been dominating them and we have already seen all the reviews show in anything but benchmarks/games that have heavy tesselation the 6850 is the new king of budget gaming.

I want to take you down a slightly different route, I want to look at what the right card is for that gaming sector. Obviously the 5870 is much more powerful and is soon to be related, but it also comes at a higher cost.. Is that cost worth it? Or are you better to go for something like the 6850? Well of course the FPS and your budget are going to decide that for you... But maybe we can shed a little light on performance along the way.

Taking a quick look at the card, this is a reference design of 6850 with a non-reference cooler. At this stage this is what alot of vendors are doing with the 6000 series, I am sure later we will see alot more non-reference cards with beefed up PWM and features coming onto the market. The 6850 only features one 6 pin PCI-E connector, it is a budget gaming card remember. The Gigabyte non-reference fan is both quiet and keeps the card cool, rarely did it get above 50 degrees celcius under long heavy loads. This fan is quiet but it does some damage also, fiddling around with the card while it was on resulted in this brutal injury.





Test Setup
Gigabyte 6850
AMD 5870
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R
Gulftown 980X @ 4GHz cpu, 3.2Ghz uncore
ADATA 1866 8-8-8-24 @ 1600 9-9-9-24

This is my standard comparison configuration





Benchmarks
* Vantage Performance - something most overclockers are familiar with and a good comparitive points against all cards
* Vantage Xtreme - Showing off the raw GPU power, taking the CPU out of the equation
* 3DMark03 - A good blend of CPU and GPU
* Crysis AVG FPS @ Veryhigh - Can it play crysis? Always need to include this one in modern review
* Heaven HWBOT DX11- Another raw GPU based benchmark, get an idea of how this GPU goes in a DX11 environment with very high settings




Results


Vantage Performance



stock 6850


6850 @ 850/1150


stock 5870



Vantage Xtreme



stock 6850


6850 @ 850/1150


stock 5870



Crysis Avg FPS



stock 6850


6850 @ 850/1150


stock 5870



Heaven



stock 6850


6850 @ 850/1150


stock 5870



3DMark03



stock 6850


6850 @ 850/1150


stock 5870





Cost per Dollar analysis

Costing was done at cheapest price I could find to purchase each unit from staticice.com.au (Australia's pricing search engine)

5870 - $359
6850 - $219










Max Overclocking

3DMark03 full pass was used as a test of max clock stability.








Clarkdale Gaming Comparison

Just for kicks I put this card into my clarkdale system, set the same clocks and punched out a Crysis and Heaven.. To see is these games gain from a massive 980X or maybe they are fine with a little clarkdale and gigabyte H55N-USB3









Brief Analysis

It is clear looking across all the benchmark results that the 6850 is no 5870 and in most tests the 5870 is 20% of above the 6850. This was to be expected, they are different specifications and not in the same price range.

Things get interesting when we start to look at price vs performance results.

The 6850 is a winner in all these tests by a massive percentage. When overclocking the 6850 we see nearly a double price/performance ratio advantage in Crysis and about a 50% advantage in Heaven. This is what "budget gaming" is right here, a card that doesn't break the bank but can deliver a large percentage of the performance of the higher end cards.

Moving onto the Max Overclocking, this is all done on the stock cooler of course and without moving the stock voltages too far.

We can see the core scales up nicely and consistantly with voltage bumps and we were passing 3DMark03 and Vantage Xtreme with 1025 core, 1.225v and reaching a maximum temperature of 55 degrees. This is a fairly impressive clock.

The memory overclocks nicely, but doesn't seem to be impacted at all with volts. I was able to bench at 1200MHz on stock volts but bumping to 1.65 didn't increase these clocks at all. Perhaps with some more time and playing with these settings we could get the voltage to help.

The Clarkdale gaming comparison is fairly interesting.

Crysis has always been known as a game that scales reasonable with CPU power and cores. It seems there is a heavy GPU bottleneck even at 4GHz, as the clarkdale system actually comes out with the advance, be it so small it is within a tolerance of difference between runs.

As Heaven is heavily GPU bound, again there is very little difference, again within a tolerance of difference between runs.

These results give a clear picture, at least with these two game benchmarks. If you are running single card gaming chances are you are going to be heavily GPU bound with the newest games. If you are purchasing an expensive X58 system, with a 980X or bloomsfield CPU it might go to waste with one GPU. Multiple GPU configurations may be difference for these benchmarks, but that is testing for another day.




No subzero?

Not yet, card is prepped though. Just waiting on the ability to push past 1025MHz with software and I'm away!