14 DAY TRIAL // Hot on the heals of PowerColor's announcement of the Radeon HD 6870 X2 graphics cards, Club 3D has also introduced a dual-GPU solution based on the Barts XT core which should also become available in the first week of July.
Even though the news may seem surprising at a first glance, the explanation is quite simple as both the PowerColor and Club 3D brands are owned by the TUL Corporation.
As a result, the Club 3D Radeon HD 6870 X2 is just a re-branded version of the PowerColor graphics card we presented yesterday, with some new logos set in place to distinguish between the two.
The cooling solution also got a new name, this is now called Coolstream, but its functionality is the same as it still relies of six rather thick copper heatpipes to draw the heat away from the two AMD GPUs and into an aluminum heatsink.
Power is provided via two 8-pin PCI Express connectors placed on the top edge of the board and then are routed to a 13-phase VRM (each core gets 4+2 phases) with ferrite Core Choke and DrMos MOSFETS.
Unlike the dual-GPU solutions developed by AMD, Club 3D's creation drops the usual PLX bridge chip that has been used ever since the days of the 5970 X2 and replaces it with a LucidLogix controller.
This is able to provide each of the two GPUs with 16 lanes worth of PCI Express bandwidth and also supports CrossFireX or Lucid Hydra Engine operation.
In the latter mode, the Barts XT cores will communicate with one another using Lucid's proprietary technology, which also allows users to mix and match GPUs from various manufacturers and product families.
Just as it was the case with the previously announced PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 X2, Club 3D's solution uses AMD's reference clocks, so the GPU is clocked at 900MHz while the memory operates at 1.05GHz (4.2GHz effective).
The Club 3D HD 6870X2 will make its way into retail in the first week of July bundled together with the DiRT 3 rally game. Recommended enduser price excluding VAT is USD 469.