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E. Nusbaum (Rowlett, TX) –

  

So the ATI Radeon 6870 by Gigabyte is a pretty great card. It comes factory overclocked by 15mhz to 915mhz and can easily overclock upwards of 990mhz without any problem. The cooler is designed to keep the card very cool under load….. assuming you’re not running Crossfire. That’s where things go terribly wrong.

The issue with this card is that the cooler doesn’t exhaust the hot air out of the case. This type of cooler design pushes cool air down towards the PCB and out the sides, at which point it’s normally exhausted out by the case fan. BUT, when running in Crossfire with two of these cards, the #1 card (at the top) is basically blowing the hot exhaust air down onto it’s cooler making for very high operating temperatures. In my experience, the #1 card easily runs 10-15c hotter than the #2 (bottom) card. This means under high GPU loads (even at stock 900mhz clocks), the #1 GPU can hit 90c and eventually reach a point where the card will disable itself because it exceeds heath thresholds.

The only solution I’ve come up with to work around this issue is under clock the #1 card to 875Mhz and have a case fan blow cool air down into the gap between the cards. Doing this, I can keep the GPU temperature around 87-88c under high GPU loads. This is obviously a design flaw in the cooling for this card as I’ve swapped my two cards and this pattern always happens to the #1 card.

So, please heed this warning if you’re looking to run this card in Crossfire: DON’T!

If you’re looking to run this card by itself, then by all means! It’s a fantastic card and great for overclocking

Cheers!

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I was gonna buy the Gigabyte ati radeon HD 6850 based on good reviews from a friend, however it was out of stock from amazon and I would have to order from a third party (and lose my super cool prime shipping), however this card was on sale for 10 bucks more then the other one, and I being the naive soul I am assumed that it could only be better then the other one (based on the higher number).

Now onto the actual review.
After receiving it and having seen my friends install I assumed it would be easy however the 6870 is much MUCH BIGGGER. Like this thing is downright HUGE. I eventually (after lots of messing with it) got it in but it obstructs most of my case (Antec P183 v3) including the HDD slots across from it. This being said I would only recommend this to an experienced computer builder. I haven’t run diagnostics or games on it yet so I couldn’t tell you specifics about how well it performs but it does look fine just doing basics (just barely got OS installed). Then again any card should be able to measure up to basic OS demands so I guess I will update this review if it doesn’t measure up for gaming and whatnot (I assume it will).

Also keep in mind that on the website for this product it says that it takes 500 W to run (takes two PCI-E plugs), I am personally using a 650 W PSU (also setup with an i5, a couple case fans, a relatively high end motherboard, an SSD, and a 7200 RPM HDD so that so I’m a little afraid to overclock at this point (don’t wanna overdo the power). So might recommend a higher end power supply if you do proceed with this card.

Also received Deus Ex with ease unlike other reviewer.

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