Radeon HD 6870 

Increases to voltage help the card with overclocking, but it is still not enough to pass the 1000 MHz barrier.

Another important point to mention is the excellent overclocking potential we have seen on our HD 6870.

This also results in additional headroom vs. NVIDIA's products if someone is willing to invest a bit of time to do overclocking.

It makes almost full use of the available height, so "breathing space" in a CrossFire configuration could be quite limited.

The HD 6870 CrossFire might work out for you if you have just enough dough for one card now, and the scope to add a second card later.

So the bottom line is that the HD 6870 CrossFire setup is more of academic value than something you should look at purchasing without knowing all your options that will be available in the next months.

There may be some optimization here in the thermal settings because the card clearly consumes less power - so it should be quieter too.

More advanced changes like different thermal solution or PCB changes are not allowed by AMD at this time.

At this time add-in-board partners are not allowed to make any changes to the PCB, components or thermal design of the HD 6870 so the possible changes are quite limited.

But then, it is the maximum configuration of the HD 6870, you cannot add a third of fourth card later, if you need more performance.

In the second BIOS, MSI has placed a low-noise optimized version of the normal performance BIOS which does a decent job reducing noise levels.

The new AMD Radeon HD 6870 offers substantially increased performance compared to the HD 5770: up by 56.

I hope this is really just an oversight on AMD side and that the media playback clocks can be optimized some more.

Last but not least, AMD has positioned their new cards at such reasonable price levels that make full HD DirectX 11 gaming available to the masses.