14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has finally reached the point where it is ready to grace the video card market with its next-generation Radeon HD 6000 Series video boards, which are powered by the Barts graphics processing unit.
The new line of video cards is, for now, represented by just two models, the HD 6870 and the HD 6850 to be exact.
These two are aimed at the higher half of the mainstream market, which means that they will be faced with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 Fermi board.
The HD 6870 has the GPU running at 900 MHz, while its 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM has a clock speed of 4,200 MHz.
The card also features a memory interface of 256 bits, 1120 stream processors and 32 ROPs, as well as multiple video outputs, two DVI, two mini DisplayPort and an HDMI connector to be exact.
What's more, it uses two 6-pin PCI Express connectors to satisfy the power draw of 151W (19W while idle).
The Radeon HD 6850 has 960 stream processors and lower clock speeds, as well as a power draw of 127W (19W idle), which lets it settle for a single 6-pin power connector.
It has 32 ROPs of its own and frequencies of 775 MHz for the GPU and 4,000 MHz for the 1GB of GDDR5, plus display output options identical to those of its sibling.
As one would expect, Advanced Micro Devices even tested these two cards against the aforementioned GTX 460.
Both HD 6000 were placed inside a system powered by the 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II 1090t, backed by 8GB of DDR3 at 1,600 MHz.
Multiple games were tested, and the newcomers were supposedly significantly superior to NVIDIA's GF104-based board.
The reasons behind this are what the CPU and GPU maker describes as improved AA and AF and more efficient tessellation, among other things.
According to the product transition plan, the existing Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 will continue as before, without getting their own HD 6000 Series successors, while the higher-end HD 6900 Series will be coming in November.
