Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 in Detail

Unlike the Radeon HD 5870, the new Radeon HD 6870 is not a huge graphics card. Information technology's not exactly meaty either, but for a mid-range menu we would say it's nigh average. The AMD reference card measures 25cm long and weighs roughly 1kg making it 3cm shorter than the Radeon HD 5870.

The GPU has been made using the 40nm process, except it features 454 million less transistors than the Radeon Hd 5870'due south Cypress XT core. This allowed AMD to compress the dice from 334mm2 to 255mm2, making the Radeon HD 6870 more fuel-efficient.

The cadre is clocked at an impressive 900MHz, 50MHz higher than the Radeon HD 5870, while the GDDR5 retentiveness operates slightly slower at 1050MHz. Pairing that frequency with a 256-scrap broad retention bus gives the Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 134.4GB/s of bandwidth, slightly less than the Hard disk drive 5870.

The Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 differs from the older Hd 5870 is in its cadre configuration. The Hard disk 6870 has been downgraded from 1600 SPUs (Stream Processing Units) and fourscore TAUs (Texture Address Units) to 1120 SPUs and 56 TAUs, while in that location are notwithstanding 32 ROPs. Information technology'll be interesting to see how this impacts the HD 6870, as it has 30% less SPUs and TAUs than the Radeon Hard disk 5870, though again it's made evident this is more than of a cutting-down mid-range offering based on a refined version of the aforementioned technology.

Cooling the HD 6870's Barts XT GPU is a fairly large aluminum heatsink, comprised of 30 fins measuring 11cm long, half-dozen.5cm wide, and 2.5cm tall. Connected to the base of the heatsink are iii copper heat pipes that help better efficiency, and a 75x20mm fan draws air in from the example and pushes it out through the rear expansion slot.

The fan operates very quietly for the well-nigh part, partly thanks to the card's impressively low 19W idle consumption. That said, it of grade spins up when gaming, as the carte consumes up to 151W under load -- twenty% less than AMD's numbers for the 5870.

The heatsink and fan are within a housing that conceals the entire graphics card. AMD adopted this design with the Radeon Hd 5870 and it helps protect the product very well; Nvidia does the same with its near prized cards.

To ensure the graphics card gets plenty power, AMD has mounted a pair of six-pin PCI Express power connectors -- identical to what you'd observe on the Radeon Hard disk 5870 besides as older Radeon graphics cards such as the 4870 and 4890.

The Radeon HD 6870 supports CrossFire technology with a connector to bridge another 6870. The but other connectors are on the I/O panel and our AMD sample featured two dual DL-DVI connectors forth with a single HDMI one.4a port and 2 mini-DisplayPort 1.ii sockets.

It is worth noting that all Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards can support a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 on up to iii monitors. Additionally, if a multi-stream hub is used with the mini-DisplayPort 1.2 sockets, the card can ability up to six monitors.