14 DAY TRIAL // Since there can never be too many video cards on the market, Gigabyte decided to take one of AMD's most recent HD 6000 Series adapters and give it a boost, as well as a custom cooling solution.
The two most recent video cards released by AMD are the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850, both of whom are aimed at the higher level of the mainstream, the so-called performance market.
An even stronger board, HD 6970, should also come out soon, to cater to the needs of the enthusiast-grade segment.
Until that board does show up, however, AMD's various partners will, of course, be selling and expanding their current offerings.
On that note, Gigabyte has prepared a new iteration of the HD 6850, one which has higher clocks than the reference solution.
Dubbed GV-R685OC-1GD, it has the Barts GPU (built on the 40nm manufacturing process) running at 820 MHz instead of 775 MHz, while the 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM is clocked at 4,200 MHz (4,000 MHz stock).
There are also 960 Stream Processors and a memory interface of 256 bits, plus support for the various technologies that consumers have come to expect.
The list includes not only DirectX 11 (tessellation, DirectCompute etc.), OpenGL 4.1 and Shader Model 5.0, but also the Eyefinity, the Avivo HD technology and CrossFireX, for multi-GPU setups.
What's more, the model boasts the Ultra Durable design and multiple video ports, namely DisplayPort, HDMI and dual-DVI.
Finally, in order to cope with the extra heat generated by the faster chip and memory, Gigabyte employed the WindForce X2 dual-fan cooling system.
Other specifications include HDCP support, compliance with the RoHS directive, support for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Unfortunately, while the product page already exists on the official website, the hardware maker has, so far, unveiled no sort of details on pricing.