PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 X2 graphics card review

Final thoughts and rating

If the Radeon HD 6870 X2 was designed to stifle NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580, then the card has to be deemed a success - it's both faster and cheaper than its green-blooded rival.

The card's opportune positioning is such that PowerColor has found a sweet spot at around the £315 mark - it's comfortably quicker than anything at this price point. Heck, stretch your budget right the way up to £400, and you're still unlikely to find a graphics card that's as quick as this.

Single-card performance is excellent, but there are a couple of caveats; the 6870 X2 can get hot under load, performance at mega-high resolutions can become memory limited, and multi-GPU performance is driver dependant so your mileage may vary. More importantly, if single-card convenience isn't high on your list of priorities, a pair of standard Radeon HD 6870s cost less and offer practically identical performance.

But credit where it's due, PowerColor's Radeon HD 6870 X2 is one of the more affordable dual-GPU solutions on the market and punches well above its weight. If pricing dips closer to the £300 mark, this goes from being intriguing to irresistible.

The Good

Very strong performance
Bundle includes a free copy of DiRT 3
Faster and cheaper than GeForce GTX 580
CrossFire link leaves room for future upgrades

The Bad

Costs more than two individual Radeon HD 6870s
Shared memory can impede performance at mega-high resolutions
Gets hot under load

HEXUS Rating

PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 X2

HEXUS Awards

PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 X2

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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Looks like a phenomenal card. I guess that the data mining capabilities would be akin to 2x6870's so no need to honk on about distributed computing capabilities. With the GPU running so hot, It'd be great to see how you'd watercool something like this? Is that something that would be reasonable to ask for as an inclusion, or maybe even a seperate article….?

If it came in at under £300 I'd be sorely tempted to reboot my entire rig and pick up one of these.

The fact that it's Powercolor puts me off. I have one of their “overclocked” 3870 cards and it won't even run at the speeds they claim for it. It only just manages stock speeds so I won't be buying anything else from them anytime soon.

I had the same experience with an XFX 8800GT (had to underclock the memory to make it stable!). So I know exactly where you're coming from with that. The fact you can also buy 2x 6870 for about £254 now is also very tempting.