As expected AMD’s closest partners has started to put more weight on overclocked Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards, to close the gap to Radeon HD 6950 and minimize NVIDIA’s influence with GeForce GTX 560 Ti. HIS and Gigabyte have presented two overclocked models, well overclocked too.
Gigabyte continues to work with the SuperOverclock series and with the new Radeon HD 6870 it has used a custom circuit board, more efficient cooler and turned up frequencies. Gigabyte GV-R687SO-1GD uses Ultra Durable VGA+ technology with extra copper layers for better cooling and stability together with the large WindForce 3X cooler. The cock frequencies are set at 950 MHz GPU and 1150 (4600 MHz) memory.
HIS has in turn expanded the IceQ X series with a severely overclocked Turbo-X model. HIS has chosen to tweak the circuit board and given the Turbo-X graphics card a big cooler with 8mm thick heatpipes and a single 92mm fan for keeping the temperatures down. This is a good thing since the frequencies are turned to 975 MHz GPU and 1150 (4600 MHz) respectively, a tad higher than Gigabyte’s model.
Both graphics card ship with a Barts XT GPU sporting 1120 stream processors working across a 256-bit memory interface. With dual DVI, dual mini-DisplayPort and one HDMI output the cards support up to six monitors.
| Model | GPU frequency | Memory frequency |
| HIS Radeon HD 6870 Turbo-X | 975 MHz | 1150 MHz (4600 MHz) |
| Gigabyte Radeon HD 6870 SuperClock | 950 MHz | 1150 MHz (4600 MHz) |
| AMD Radeon HD 6870 reference | 900 MHz | 1100 MHz (4200 MHz) |
We can expect more overclocked Radeon HD 6870 models in the future and these should be interesting alternatives for mid-range buyers.
