Jun 22, 2011 10:11 GMT  ·  By

Showcased for the very first time during the Computex 2011 fair, PowerColor's dual-GPU Radeon HD 6870 graphics card was now made official and the initial shipments are expected to reach store shelves in the first week of July.

The card is based on a custom PowerColor design and it uses a dual-fan cooling system that packs a massive aluminum heatsink, which spans most of the card, and six direct contact copper heatpipes to draw the heat away from the two Barts XT cores.

These are powered by two independent 4+2 phase VRMs with ferrite Core Choke and DrMos MOSFETS, which route their power from two 8-pin PCI Express connectors placed on the top edge of the board.

Unlike the dual-GPU solutions developed by AMD, the two Barts XT cores are connected together via a LucidLogix bridge chip that gives each GPU 16 lanes worth of PCI Express bandwidth for increased performance.

The Lucid chip also enables the two Barts XT cores to work in CrossFireX mode or to use the Lucid Hydra Engine.

Configured in the latter mode, PowerColor's creation can work in tandem with any other (no matter the brand or model) graphics card installed inside the system.

As far as the operating clocks of PowerColor's dual-GPU solution are concerned, these follow AMD's reference design and are set at 900MHz for the GPU and 1.05GHz (4.2GHz effective) for the memory.

Each of the two Barts XT GPUs used for PowerColor's Radeon HD 6870 X2 graphics card include 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus that connects to 1GB of GDDR5 frame buffer.

The PowerColor HD 6870X2 will make its way into retail in the first week of July at an yet unknown price point, bundled together with the DiRT 3 rally game.