Jan 12, 2011 09:22 GMT  ·  By

Back in November of 2010 we brought you a first look at an early passively cooled Radeon HD 6850 prototype that was being designed by PowerColor. Now we have more details about that upcoming card since the Taiwanese company showcased it during the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.

The first thing that you notice while taking a look at it is how surprisingly little it has changed since the first pictures made their appearance.

As a matter of fact, the only visible difference is the absence of the SCS3 sticker that was placed on the card's heatsink.

Otherwise, the colling system seems to have been kept unmodified, as it still uses the same distinctive aluminum heatsink that wraps the cards in a L-shape manner, taking advantage of the extra space that is usually available between the top of the card and the chassis' side panel.

Heat is drawn form the GPU via five pretty thick heatpipes, probably made out of anodized copper.

The Radeon HD 6850 GPU is based on AMD's Barts graphics core and features 960 stream processors, 48 texturing units, 32 ROPs as well as a 256-bit memory interface.

Its core is usually clocked at 775MHz while the GDDR5 memory runs at 1GHz (4GHz effective), but is highly possible that PowerColor choose to drop these frequencies a bit in order to decrease the power consumption of the card (making it better suited for a passive cooler design).

According to AMD, the Radeon HD 6850 load power consumption is rated at 127W while idle TDP is 19W.

As far as the available video connectors are concerned, PowerColor's solution will feature dual DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, together with EyeFinity support.

The card hasn't been priced by now, but it should become available sometime in March with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. (via Bjorn3D)