14 DAY TRIAL // While NVIDIA is selling its new GTX 570 and AMD is preparing its Cayman-based boards, XFX decided to 'fill the void,' so to speak, by delivering a new version of one board already on sale, the Radeon HD 6850.
For those interested in a reminder, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 is one of the two Radeon HD 6000 series for the higher level of the mainstream market.
They were released a while ago by the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU maker and have been battling the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 ever since.
Now, XFX decided it was time to release a new iteration of the HD 6850, even if it doesn't have anything extra in terms of performance.
What this means is that the newcomer has the same clock speeds as AMD's reference board.
On the other hand, its maker was sure to replace the cooling solution with a different one, which uses two fans in order to drive temperatures lower than AMD's cooler could.
Those that have been keeping an eye on the developments on the graphics market will know that the HD 6850 is powered by the Barts GPU.
In this case, said graphics processing unit works at a frequency of 775 MHz, while the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM operates at a memory clock of 4,000 MHz.
Additionally, the graphics adapter features 960 stream processors and a memory interface of 256 bits. Basically, it is a very powerful card that should handle most, if not all games at maximum settings.
Furthermore, compatibility with a wide variety of displays is ensured by the existence of two DVI, one DisplayPort connector and an HDMI output.
Needless to say, the card has full support for DirectX 11, CrossFire X multi-GPU setups and AMD/ATI's various other technologies.
End-users should be able to locate the XFX Radeon HD 6850 Dual Fan edition on Scan.co.uk, for a price of £157.07.