HIS Radeon 6850 & 6870 Review

HIS HD6870 Pictures

Moving on to the higher specced HIS HD6870 we find the packaging nearly identical. A very sturdy box absolutely no bigger than it has to be. It’s also nice that HIS haven’t taken advantage of any model number confusion to shout loudly from the packaging in the hopes of attracting a few less savvy purchases. Integrity is always a plus point.

      

Design wise the HIS 6870 returns to the “fan up one end” that we’ve all got used to in reference designs. It’s never made any sense to me because if you want to keep the GPU cool then on top of it is surely the most efficient design? We don’t put our CPU heatsink fans on top of the optical drives do we.

As we’ve moved up from the replacement for the 5770 to the replacement for the base model in the 58 series we have an increase in power available meaning the HIS HD6870 has the full compliment of display options.

      

Along with this extra horsepower is an extra PCIe 6pin input to make sure you can keep on rocking regardless of power requirements.

      

Following the HD6850 design we can see that the HD6870 also moves the power circuitry to the left hand side of the card and the second bank of RAM to the right hand side of the GPU. A cynic would say this is to make sure that third-party 5 series coolers would be incompatible.

With the shroud removed we find the much larger heatsink than we saw on the HD6850. Although if anything it does demonstrate how illogical the reference fan placement is.