14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire, one of AMD’s closest graphics card partners, has just announced earlier today the introduction of a new version of its Radeon HD 6850 model that has gained 2GB of video memory in order to make the card better suited for high-resolution gaming.
Outside of this change, Sapphire’s solution has remained pretty much unchanged from its predecessor aside from the added support for the DisplayPort 1.2 standard.
Thanks to this, the card can drive up to three monitors simultaneously with the aid of an appropriate hub.
As most of you have surely noticed, the cooling system was also left unaltered and it relies on a single large diameter fan that expels the heat produced by the card back in the system’s case.
As far as the operating clocks of the core and memory are concerned these match AMD’s reference frequencies for the HD 6850 as the GPU is run at 775MHz, while the memory works at 1GHz (4GHz effective).
Like most other solutions based on the Radeon HD 6850 design, Sapphire's creation is equipped with two DVI (one DVI-D and one DVI-I), one HDMI and also with a single DisplayPort connectors.
However, owners of older monitors with VGA inputs can still use this solution thanks to a supplied DVI-to-VGA dongle.
No information regarding the pricing or the released date of the Sapphire HD 6850 2GB graphics card was supplied by the manufacturer, so it remains to be seen just how much will Sapphire ask for the extra 1GB of memory.
The Radeon HD 6850 is based on AMD's Barts Pro core and it packs 960 stream processors, 48 texturing units, 32 ROP units, and a 256-bit memory bus usually connected to 1GB of GDDR5 memory.