It's Official: AMD Rebrands Radeon HD 5700 into HD 6700 Series

While there have been numerous rumors about this before and some indication in OEM offerings, AMD and its board partners officially announce their Radeon HD 6750/6770 products today. Under the hood the same hardware with the very same specs as the Radeon HD 5750/5770 released in 2009 is employed. AMD is even upfront with this fact, so we can’t blame them for sneaky rebadging even if we wanted to. From a beancounter perspective, it is perfectly normal to move from the cold Canada (Evergreen, HD 5000) to the Caribbean (Northern Islands, HD 6000).


Good Bye, ATI: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Becomes AMD Radeon HD 6700 Series (one GPU, two names).

Technically speaking, the cards feature a Juniper XT/Pro GPU that consists of 1.04 billion transistors, is manufactured on a 40nm process and weighs in at a 166mm² die size. For the Radeon HD 6770 it features 800 stream processors clocked at 850MHz and 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 memory clocked at 1.2GHz yielding 76.8GB/s of bandwidth. The HD 6750 comes in at 720 stream processors clocked at 700MHz. The memory is packed in the same amount but clocked a tad slower at 1.15GHz, resulting in 73.66GB/s bandwidth.

For Germany we got informed that the MSRPs of the HIS 6750 is at €89.90 and for the HIS 6770 at €99.90. ASUS suggests €107 for the HD 6750 Formula and €121 for the HD 6770 DirectCU. The ASUS models feature an
updated PCB and custom cooling solutions. All these prices include 19% VAT. Club3D didn't name MSRPs but offers custom cooling solutions as well. Their HD 6750 is even passively cooled. Sapphire also offers a slightly overclocked version of the HD 6770 with 860MHz core clock dubbed Vapor-X, a model with increased display connectivity dubbed Flex and a 512MB variant of the HD 6750 in addition to standard models.

Street prices of the HD 6750/6770 were almost unavailable at press time. Though as a shopping tip, before buying a HD 6750/6770, compare prices with the equivalent product of the previous series. In the beginning I'd expect slightly higher prices for the newer cards. Currently a HD 5770 is available starting at $109 at Newegg or around €87 in Europe. When taking current exchange rates and VAT (around 20% in a lot of european countries) into account, the prices are almost the same in the US and Europe. If you find a HD 5770 on sale, have in mind that you'd get the same performance as the HD 6770. Or as Charles Dickens wrote, old lamps for new ones.