14 DAY TRIAL // Since this is, without a doubt, the AMD Radeon 6800 Series day, we're seeing just about all of AMD's partners push new solutions onto the market, with Asus being, quite obviously, one of the first integrators to launch new Radeons and, more importantly, one of the first to offer overclockers some pretty good news.
So, first of all, the two models from the company's EAH6800 Series, namely the EAH6850 DirectCU and EAH6870, ship with factory overclocked cores set to 790MHz and 913MHz, thus providing at least a slight performance improvement in certain games.
Also, the cards offer the exclusive ASUS Voltage Tweak technology that provides real-time voltage adjustment of various GPU components, including the core and video memory, making ASUS EAH6800 Series graphics cards 50% faster than the reference design.
The ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU also incorporates exclusive DirectCU cooling that uses custom-flattened, all-copper heat pipes in direct contact with the GPU core, a feature that improves cooling by 20% compared to the reference design and offers quiet operation when the card is idle.
On the other hand, the ASUS EAH6870 is equipped with an aluminum fan cover that improves cooling efficiency and reduces surface temperatures by 14 degrees Celsius, compared to the reference design’s plastic cover.
Naturally, both the EAH6850 DirectCU/2DIS/1GD5 and EAH6870/2DI2S/1GD5 cards feature AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology, AMD HD3D technology and DirectX 11 support, but that, after all, is valid for just about every new card in the Radeon family to arrive on the market these days.
The ASUS EAH6800 Series graphics cards are expected to ship October 22, 2010 and will be available from authorized ASUS resellers, pricing depending largely on the local markets, but we can probably expect these things to be slightly more expensive than some of the other products in the same category given the overclocking headroom it provides.
