14 DAY TRIAL // With the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series quickly approaching, it is no surprise to hear of reports on them or custom-made versions, and XFX seems to have already completed its models, or at least the HD 6850, according to a recent leak.
As end-users will likely know by now, the HD 6000 line will be tasked with taking NVIDIA's Fermi cards head-on.
It will be powered by a new series of GPUs which, while still based on the 40nm process, promise a higher performance compared to their predecessors.
As one would expect, the HD 6870 and 6850 will be the more powerful mainstream models of the series, and it seems that XFX is ready to launch its HD 6850 as soon as AMD gives the word.
It seems that, since it no longer makes NVIDIA boards, XFX is quite eager to ensure that its AMD-based offer is up to or above standards.
According to a recent leak, the Radeon HD 6850, the custom-model from XFX at least, has been pictured.
The board is quite a bit shorter than the HD 6870 and has a cooler composed of a circular fan-heatsink that covers the graphics processing unit.
It is unclear from the photos, but it is possible that the memory and VRM have heatsinks of their own as well.
There are 960 stream processors available, along with 1 GB of GDDR5, while the GPU clock is of 775 MHz and the VRAM runs at 1,000 MHz (4,000 MHz GDDR5 effective).
Additionally, the report mentions a memory bandwidth of 256 bits and multiple display outputs, including a pair of DVI ports, a DisplayPort 1.2 connector and an HDMI 1.4 output.
The actual price of this model has not actually been disclosed, but is expected to be at least mildly competitive.
Those interested in it, however, will have to wait until October 22 for it to actually become available.