Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB features a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 480 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 3870 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 3870 512MB	Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Nov 19, 2007	February 2011
Code Name	RV670 XT	Turks
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16/AGP 8x	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	775 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	900 MHz (1800 MHz effective)	1000 MHz (4000 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	320(64x5)	480
Texture Mapping Units	16	24
Render Output Units	16	8
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	106 watts	63 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	57600 MB/sec	64000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	12400 Mtexels/sec	19200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12400 Mpixels/sec	6400 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.