14 DAY TRIAL // Right now, neither NVIDIA nor AMD plan on soon releasing any new and amazing video card, so it falls to their partners to challenge each other, much like how PowerColor plans to play the multi-monitor card sooner rather than later.
Right now, there seems to have been a situation reversal of sorts on the consumer graphics cards market.
While, around this time last year, Advanced Micro Devices was the only one with DirectX 11 cards out, now it is NVIDIA that has the more powerful boards on the market (500 Series).
Still, their various manufacturing partners have their own technologies and coolers to allow their inventions to stand apart from the rest.
Some use factory overclocking and massive coolers, while others focus more on silence and durability, or all of them at once.
This time, PowerColor decided (or so reports say) to turn things up to 11, or at least half-way, by expanding its collection of Radeon HD 6800 Series boards.
The card in question is a reiteration of the HD 6870 only with enough video outputs to handle Eyefinity 6 multi-monitor setups.
For those that may have forgotten, Eyefinity 6 allows one to spread the screen over six displays at once, usually intended for gaming, though the monitors will need particularly thin bezels, plus DisplayPort inputs.
On that note, the Barts XT GPU-based adapter will feature six of those very connectors and will utilize the same cooler as the one on the PCS boards.
It is interesting that a HD 6800 card would get six-monitor display capabilities, considering that Eyefinity 6 is usually reserved for high-end boards (HD 6900 as it were).
Unfortunately, there was no mention of clock speeds and memory, nor of the pricing and availability, although CeBIT 2011 may bring these answers.
Of course, one can safely (most likely) assume that, besides DirectX 11, CrossFireX, Stream and all other AMD technologies will be supported.