14 DAY TRIAL // With the HD 6000 series coming in fast, details on its various members were bound to be leaked, and it seems that a pair of ASUS cards, the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 to be more exact, have already been listed online.
For those interested in a reminder, the Radeon HD 6000 line of graphics cards is the upcoming series from Advanced Micro Devices.
Originally meant to be built with GPUs based on the 32nm process, they ended up settling for the 40nm when TSMC scrapped its 32nm plans.
It is this line that will be tasked with taking on the full power of NVIDIA's Fermi series, which has only recently offered a model for the entry-level market.
The HD 6000 will also mark AMD's abandonment of the ATI brand in favor of strengthening its own.
Among the more powerful HD 6000 cards will be the HD 6850 and 6870, and it seems that the custom-versions that ASUS is preparing have already been listed.
The boards go by the names of EAH6850 DC/2DIS/1GD5 and EAH6870 2DI2S/1GD5 and are, as one can guess from the names, the HD 6850 and 6870, respectively.
The first of them has the GPU, the Barts as it is more commonly known, clocked at 790 MHz, somewhat above the frequency of the reference model, and 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM at 4,000 MHz.
There are also 800 stream processors, a memory interface of 256 bits, dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs and the DirectCU cooling solution.
The more powerful HD 6870 is factory overclocked to 913 MHz, has 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and, like its sibling, supports DirectX 11 and AMD's various video technologies.
The EAH6850 DC/2DIS/1GD5 has a price of $218.44, while its more capable sibling, the EAH6870 2DI2S/1GD5, is paired with a tag of $270.60.