14 DAY TRIAL // The AMD Radeon HD 6000 series is approaching fast and it seems that, despite AMD's attempts at keeping the lid on, the clocks of the HD 6970 and HD 6850 may have finally been leaked by premature listings of the Sapphire-built models.
For those interested in a reminder, the AMD HD 6000 series will be powered by the same 40nm manufacturing process as the GPUs in the H 5000 series.
They will supposedly be superior in all respects to these predecessors of theirs and meant to give NVIDIA's Fermi cards a hard time.
The first two models set to make their debut are the HD 6850 and the HD 6870, both of which are powered by the Barts graphics processing unit.
The actual clock speeds of these incoming board have been kept secret until now, but it seems that they are no longer hidden.
Apparently, the Sapphire custom-made video controllers were listed by a Dutch store ahead of time, as was discovered by Dinox PC, along with the supposed frequencies of the GPU and memory.
The Radeon HD 6850 has the Barts operating at 725 MHz, while the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM is set at 4,000 MHz.
The HD 6870 is, of course, faster, with GPU and memory clocks of 900 MHz and 4,200 MHz, respectively.
Both of them support DirectX 11 and come with a memory interface of 256 bits, a TDP of under 150W, CrossFire and multiple video outputs, namely two DVI, a HDMI 1.4 port and two mini DisplayPort 1.2 connectors.
The Sapphire HD 6850 was paired with a price of 189 Euro ($265.7) while the HD 6870 was listed for 255 Euro, the equivalent of $358.5.
Of course, the conversion may not provide an accurate estimate for the actual prices that the boards will sport in the US.