HD 6870 and HD 6850 Officially Named and Pictured

We can finally tell you that AMD Radeon HD 6800 series cards have got an official name – the HD 6870 and the HD 6850 and we will finally give you a look at them since we will be reviewing both of them in-depth for publication as soon as the information embargo is lifted by AMD.  We also notice that the ATi branding is gone with HD 6000 series, it’s now AMD Radeon.

We are going to save all of the information that we have for our upcoming article.  As an example of what is also in store for you, we got a a chance to look at an AMD platform that was running an early version of the Llano Fusion processor and watched it run Aliens vs. Predators demo at a press event in Los Angeles last week.   This is the first time that AMD’s Llano has been demoed in public.  Look for its production in the first half of next year.   We think we can share some of AMD’s Fusion vision with you as we take a close look at their brand new discrete second-generation DX11 video cards. However, this editor needs to get back to benchmarking HD 6870/HD 6850 so as to have this major review published on time.  There is a discussion in our forum and we can perhaps add some more pictures and take requests for our upcoming series of articles in this thread.

Without further delay, here are the brand new HD 6870 and HD 6850 pictured along with HD 5870 and a couple of Nvidia video cards, GTX 480 and GTX 460.

Now check out the power connectors: Let’s flip them over, shall we? Notice anything different about the connectors? – the HD 5870 is between the HD 68×0 cards.  Any questions about Eyefinity?  We promise to explain in our evaluation of HD 67×0 … soon.

We ought to set the HD 6870 and HD 6850 next to some of the cards they will be competing with to compare them size-wise; to HD 5870 Diamond reference and Powercolor’s PCS+, reference GTX 480 and EVGA overclocked GTX 460-1GB.  Which cards will they be competing with, price and performance wise?  We promise answers.

Stay tuned for the review and the introduction to HD 6000 series.  In the meantime, check out ABT forum.  And this editor needs to get back to benching.  We just added Grand Theft Auto IV and Lost Planet 2 to our benchmark suite making for a total of 23 games and two synthetic benchmarks that we will use to evaluate these brand new cards.

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Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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