14 DAY TRIAL // Outside of the monstrous Radeon HD 6970 X2 graphics card that we presented a short while ago, PowerColor is also working on developing a dual-GPU HD 6870 solution, which was also on display at Computex.
The card is based on a custom PowerColor design and it uses a dual-fan cooling system that packs a massive aluminum heatsink, which spans most of the card, and five copper heatpipes that draw the heat away from the two Barts XT cores.
These are powered by two independent 4+2 phase VRMs, which route their power from two 8-pin PCI Express connectors placed on the top edge of the board.
Just as it was the case with the Radeon HD 6970 X2 that we presented yesterday, the two Barts chips are linked to each other using a LucidLogix bridge chip.
This offers a few advantages over the standard PLX chip used by AMD for its dual-GPU solutions, as it can provide each of the two cores with a full 16 lanes worth of PCI Express bandwidth and it can also work in tandem with any other (no matter the brand or model) graphics card found inside the system.
In addition, if consumers don't like the performance they get when running the card in Lucid's Hydra mode, they can always switch back to CrossFireX.
Sadly, PowerColor hasn't mentioned the clock speeds the two GPUs are designed to run at, but these are expected to be clocked at least as high as the reference Radeon HD 6870 graphics card (single GPU).
Each of the two Barts XT GPUs installed on the PCB include 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus that connects to 1GB of GDDR5 frame buffer.
This is clocked at 1.05GHz (4.2GHz effective), while the stock operating frequency of the graphics core is set at 900MHz.
PowerColor hasn't revealed any information regarding the release date of the Radeon HD 6870 X2. (via TechPowerUp)
