HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ Ten Turbo 10

The Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 is non a huge graphics carte du jour, though it'southward non exactly compact either. We would say it's average sized for a mid-range card. The HIS Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 IceQ X Turbo X uses the AMD reference pattern and measures nine.five" (24cm) long, about 3cm shorter than the HD 5870.

Like the Radeon HD 6850, the Barts XT GPU has been fabricated using the 40nm procedure and features 454 million less transistors than the Radeon HD 5870'south Cypress XT core. The Radeon HD 6870 also has the aforementioned 255mm2 die size equally the 6850.

The core is clocked at an impressive 900MHz, 50MHz college than the Radeon Hd 5870, while the GDDR5 memory operates slightly slower at 1050MHz. Pairing that frequency with a 256-bit memory bus gives the Radeon HD 6870 134.4GB/south of bandwidth, a tad less than the HD 5870.

However, all those X's in the card'south branding means this is no standard Radeon HD 6870. The 6870 IceQ X Turbo Ten features a cadre clock frequency of 975MHz and a GDDR5 retentiveness speed of 1150MHz (4.6GHz DDR). The former has been increased by 8% and the latter past 10%, which nosotros expect to provide a ~viii% performance boost versus a stock clocked board.

The Radeon HD 6870 IceQ 10 Turbo X'southward memory operates at 1150MHz using Elpida W1032BABG-50-F modules, which are rated for 1250MHz (5.0GHz DDR). As nosotros mentioned on the final page, this should give us some room to play with.

The Radeon HD 6870 differs from the older Hard disk drive 5870 in its core configuration, having been downgraded from 1600 SPUs (Stream Processing Units) and 80 TAUs (Texture Address Units) to 1120 SPUs and 56 TAUs, while at that place are even so 32 ROPs.

The AMD reference libation found on the Barts XT GPU is quite big in its own correct, simply HIS has replaced it with their IceQ X cooler. The reference cooler is comprised of thirty fins measuring iv.3" (11cm) long, ii.5" (six.5cm) wide, i" (2.5cm) tall and is connected to the base of operations via three 6mm heatpipes. It'due south cooled using a 75mm fan that can get quite noisy.

HIS claims that their IceQ X heatsink and fan philharmonic keeps the 6870 IceQ Ten Turbo 15 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference heatsink. Once again, the IceQ Ten features four large 8mm heatpipes that extract oestrus from the copper base plate and distributes it across an expanse of 7.2" (18cm) past iii.ii" (8cm) featuring 44 aluminum fins. Those fins are cooled by a large 3.half dozen" (ix.2cm) fan that runs incredibly repose.

As we found when taking a closer look at the HIS Radeon Hard disk drive 6850, the IceQ 10 libation doesn't encompass the retentivity IC's and power circuitry. The same thin aluminum strip cools four power MOSFETs while the memory is passively cooled by an aluminum heatspreader.

To ensure the graphics card gets enough power, the AMD reference pattern calls for a pair of 6-pivot PCI Limited power connectors -- identical to what you lot'd discover on the Radeon HD 5870 every bit well as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

The Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 supports Crossfire engineering science with a connector to bridge another 6750 and nosotros intend to test this feature. Similar the 6850, the 6870'south I/O panel has dual DL-DVI connectors along with a unmarried HDMI 1.4a port and ii mini-DisplayPort 1.ii sockets. All Hard disk drive 6870 graphics cards can back up a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 on upwardly to three monitors.