14 DAY TRIAL // Although there are a few more days to go until AMD officially releases the Radeon HD 6790 graphics card, ColorFire has already finalized its own version of the graphics card that features a custom designed PCB and cooling solution, built with the extreme overclocker in mind.
Judging by the pictures provided by Expreview, the card should go by the name of Xstorm HD 6790 as it features the same cooling solution as that used by the ColorFire Xstorm HD 6870 we detailed yesterday.
For those of you that aren't accustomed with the Xstorm cooling, this uses three heatpipes to draw the heat away from the core and into an aluminum heatsink that is chilled thanks to a massive fan, which seems to measure 92mm.
In addition, the Xstorm card also got a custom-printed circuit board (PCB) as well as some pretty interesting overclocking features.
For the Xstorm HD 6790, this means that the graphics card is now powered by a 4+1 phase power supply, each phase is made up by R47 ferrite choke, three mosfets and Japanese NCC capacitors, and that it packs a special OCP Unlocker DIP switch.
Furthermore, ColorFire's solution also gets a metal PCB backplate that is designed to stiffen the board when extreme cooling solutions are used, such as LN2 or dry ice pots, as well as a dual-BIOS design.
This allows the user to switch between the card's regular operating frequencies and a second preset that features a heavily overclocked GPU and memory profile by a simple push of a switch.
The button is found on the card's bracket and although we don't know what the frequencies of the two presets are, considering the fact that reports suggest the HD 6790 can clock past 1GHz, and ColorFire's track record, I am expecting the GPU to be clocked somewhere in the vicinity of 1050MHz.
The regular HD 6790 has its operating frequencies set at 840MHz for the core and 4200MHz for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory and packs 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit memory interface.
The price of the Xstorm HD 6790 has been set at $167.8 US.
