14 DAY TRIAL // Nobody can deny the fact that AMD's new HD 6800 graphics card series has been up to a great start, as you can certainly see from our HD 6870 review, but there is one Chinese manufacturer out there that thinks it can do a much better then its competition when it comes down to designing their own custom HD 6850, Colorfire just releasing a HD 5850 PCB packing, Zalman VF3000 cooled 6850.
Taking a good look at this graphics card you will see this actually doesn't have all that much in common with a regular HD 6850 solution, Colorfire choosing to use a HD 5850 PCB when designing its graphics card, since the Barts GPU is pin-compatible with Cypress.
As a result we get a longer PCB, that comes with a 8 phase power delivery circuit (six for the GPU, one for the memory chips and one for the I/O circuitry), all of these being controlled by a CHL8266 chip, produced by CHiL.
Moving on, we also get a dual-Crossfire connectors (something that we really missed in the HD 6870 and HD 6850's design), although we don't know if this will actually enable users to build triple and quad-CrossFireX setups since the HD 6800 series is limited at operating a maximum of two cards in parallel as well as two 6-pin PCIe power connectors (a bit overkill if you ask me).
As I stated earlier, cooling this card is a Zalman VF3000 equipped with dual 92mm fans, that should be able to handle AMD's GPU without too much trouble.
However, although Colorfire choose to use a non-reference PCB design as well as a improved cooling solution, this card comes with the stock clocks specified by AMD, so the GPU is running at 775MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 4000MHz.
Pricing hasn't been specified, nor if this thing will actually be available outside China, although I doubt this will be the case. (Via TCMagazine)
