AMD Radeon 6900 & 6800 Updated - Conclusions

Submitted by skipclarke on 24 February, 2011 - 03:02

Article Type: 
Review

Conclusions

There are really no new conclusions over our previous benchmarks of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 and HD 6900 cards. Overall they perform well at extreme attractive price points, with great heat, power and noise profiles. While our earlier tests showed marginal improvements in many areas (especially with a single widescreen), these DX11-focused tests show greater improvements over the Radeon HD 5800 series.


Final Thoughts

In many of these tests (especially in single widescreen), the stock Intel Core i7-920 is becoming a bottleneck. While I think it will serve well enough through the upcoming "Antilles" Dual-GPU 6990 testing (whenever that is), the 2+ year old Nehalem chip will need to be replaced to show differentiation between the GPUs. I will probably upgrade to a Sandy Bridge platform later in the year.

If AMD follows its previous release cycle (new architecture each September), I will certainly need to upgrade CPUs before the 7000 series come along. And to think, we're almost half way there...