14 DAY TRIAL // PowerColor, one of AMD's most important graphics cards partners, is working to develop a special version of the Radeon HD 6870 that will use two Barts XT GPUs connected together in an internal CrossFire mode.
The graphics card, which hasn't been yet named, is based on a custom PowerColor design and will most probably become the first dual-GPU Radeon HD 6870 to see the light of day.
Unfortunately, not so many details about its specifications are available at this time, but it seems like this will use a fully-fledged version of the Barts XT core and that it will work at the default HD 6870 clock speeds (or come with slightly higher frequencies).
According to Donanim Haber, the cooling system has been redesigned to cope with the increased amount of heat generated by the card while running.
Power delivery has also been enhanced, as it now features dual 8-pin PCI Express connectors, compared to the dual 6-pin arrangement of the original HD 6870.
In addition, the graphics card packs CrossFire support, a pair of dual-link DVI outputs, two mini-DisplayPort connectors and an HDMI 1.4a output.
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.
The load TDP of a single HD 6870 is rated at 151W, so a dual-GPU solution should consume less than 300W as the GPUs share some of the PCB components.
The dual-GPU PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 is expected to be showcased at Computex 2011, and it should become available after the fair. Pricing should also be established after Computex.