ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU

It's been almost a year that AMD announced its HD5XXX series graphics cards. Now ASUS already has the HD6850 DirectCU ready which carries a non standard cooler and is one of the major players in the midrange sector. Customers should really be aware that the HD6850 isn't the direct successor of the HD5850 it is more the successor of the HD5770. 

We'd like to thank ASUS for providing us with the testsample. 

The HD6850 carries a cheaper version of the GPU which before the launch has been known as "Barts". On the ASUS HD6850 we find this GPU with a clock speed of 790 MHz which is a bit above the reference value AMD recommends for this chip. It's very likely that ASUS decided to overclock this GPU because the used their own "DirectCU" cooler which works more efficient than AMDs reference cooler. Furthermore the card also works with the ASUS SmartDoctor Tool which makes adjusting voltages and clock frequencies possible.
ASUS provided the EAH6850 with 1'024 MByte graphics memory which clocks at 4'000 MHz. That the GPU comes with a standard core frequency of 790 MHz we already mentioned. There are furthermore 48 texture units which quite accurately shows that the HD6850 must be the successor of the HD5770. If you look at the power consumption of this card the manufacturers provide you with a TDP of 127 Watts which is very reasonable for a card with this level of performance.

	GTX 480	ASUS EAH6850	ASUS EAH5870
Chip	GF100	RV940	RV870
Process	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	3.2 billion	1.7 billion	2.15 billion
GPU clock	700 MHz	790 MHz	850 MHz
Shader clock	1'401 MHz	790 MHz	850 MHz
Memory	1'536 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5
Memory clock	1'848 MHz	1'000 MHz	1'200 MHz
Memory interface	384 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit
Memory bandwidth	177'408 MB/s	128'000 MB/s	153'600 MB/s
TMUs	60	48	80
TAUs	60	48	80
Shader Cores	480 (1D)	192 (5D)	320 (5D)
ROPs	48 ROP	32 ROP	32 ROP
Shader model	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5
Maximum board power	250 Watt	127 Watt	188 Watt

from : ocaholic.ch