14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's Radeon HD 6850 proved itself to be quite a success in the mainstream market, so the fact that various integrates chose this GPU to build customized graphics cards is hardly surprising, but Afox’ recently launched HD 6850 solution seems to blow all the other third-party designs out of the water as the company has somehow managed to build a single slot, only PCI Express powered version of the card.
This is called the AF6850-1024D5S1 and, unlike most other Radeon HD 6850-based solutions, uses a cooling system that was designed to occupy only one PCI Express slot.
The heat generated while running is expelled through the back of the card as well as through some vent holes that are placed on its metal shroud.
Even more impressive than the cooling system is the fact that Afox has somehow managed to build the card so that it won't require any additional power except for the 75W that are provided via the PCI Express x16 slot.
How they managed to achieve this remains a mystery as the Barts GPU, used for the Radeon HD 6850, has an estimated power consumption of about 127W in load, so such cards usually require an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector to be installed.
Furthermore, the card is based on a fully working version of the HD 6850 core and it sticks to AMD's reference clocks that put the core at 775MHz and the GDDR5 memory at 1GHz (4GHz effective).
As far as the card's video outputs are concerned, their layout had to be tweaked so that they would all fit considering the limited space available, but Afox has still managed to cram a dual-link DVI, a DisplayPort, a mini-DP and an HDMI connector.
Afox' single slot HD 6850 is available for purchase in Japan for 19,780 Yen, which translates into about $243 US. (via Akiba PC Hotline!)
