And so it starts! The Barts core AMD 6800 series video cards were released to the world officially on October 22 2010. These cards delivered performance above what they were projected to deliver, all for a very reasonable price point. NVIDIA countered with factory overclocked examples of the FERMI architecture equipped GTX 460 and GTX 470, which offers additional performance, making the match-up a bit closer than it originally was going to be. Now, just a week later, the overclocked cards from AMD and its partners are rolling out the doors. The first factory overclocked example I will be looking at comes from XFX in the form of its Black Edition HD 6850. Now we all know the Black Edition cards that roll out of the doors of XFX have a little something special and this one indeed is, with the clock speeds at 850Mhz on the core and at a hefty 1100MHz on the 1GB of GDDR5 memory. These speeds are pretty decent increases over the base clock speeds of 775/1000MHz, which the base versions come equipped with. We saw how the XFX 6850 overclocked in our AMD 6800 series launch article with an overclock of 972MHz on the Barts core and 1159MHz on the memory, while staying relatively cool due to the heat pipe based cooling solution. Running cool is the name of the game when overclocking and XFX utilizes a different method to rid the core of its thermal energy by way of a Vapor Chamber type heat sink made popular by Sapphire and used as the reference cooling solution on the top card in AMD's DirectX 11 arsenal, the HD 5970. Let's take a walk on the dark side and see how the XFX HD 6850 Black edition performs.
Closer Look:
The packaging that came with the XFX HD 6850 Black edition mirrored the stock packaging. The front and rear views contained a wealth of information about the card: its capabilities and the technologies it supports including DirectX 11, Eyefinity, Advanced Parallel Processing, CrossFireX, Stereoscopic 3D and Unified Video Decoder 3. In lieu of showing the packaging I received, I will show a representation of the final product packaging.
Inside the outer sleeve is a box that contains the subject of this closer look, the the XFX HD 6850 BE. The outside is black and features the XFX logo and slogan "Play Hard" in green with the XFX web link to the right. The inside of the box is broken up into compartments with the peripherals such as the manuals, driver disk and adapters up top, with the video card stored underneath. From the first look, the Black edition seems to be similar to the standard card in its length and build.The accessory bundle for this card contains the driver disk, an AMD GPU guide, quick install guide, a door tag that lets your family know not to disturb you while you are dishing out a world of hurt to your opponents, and a single Crossfire bridge connection.Really the only thing special thus far is the Black Edition's promise of enhanced performance. With its impressive factory overclock that should be a forgone conclusion.
The XFX HD 6850 Black edition is a card that features a custom PCB and higher end components than what the reference design uses. It features solid capacitors, DR.MOSFETs, covered Ferrite chokes, digital PWM circuitry and a 2oz copper layer PCB so that you can be assured of a card that has components that operate at cooler temperatures and operate more efficiently than traditional components. This should help increase the lifespan of the card even in its factory-overclocked state. Black Edition card are factory-overclocked cards from XFX that come with a lifetime warranty in case the unthinkable happens. The front of the card mirrors the pre-production packaging and looks like the standard HD 6850, but that will change for the retail version. The card is meant to be used in a 16x PCIe 2.1 slot, but is backwards compatible for earlier motherboards. The rear of the card is typical of cards with 1GB of on board memory, with only the bracket securing the heat sink and surface mount components taking up residence. The top of the shroud is full of ventilation holes that allow the heat sink to breathe.Connectivity options for this card include two DVI ports, one of which is a single link design, while the other is s Dual Link capable port, a single Mini HDMI port that supports HDMI 1.4a, and a single full size Display Port 1.2 port in lieu of the two mini DP ports used on the reference versions of the HD 6850. This still allows you to run an Eyefinity setup using the correct adapters. The backplate has the XFX logo instead of the normal slots seen for ventilation. This looks like there is more surface area available for the air to flow through, helping cooling. The back end of the card is full of ventilation holes again for allowing this card to breathe and discharge the thermal energy expended by the GPU core into the Vapor Chamber based cooling solution. Also on the back end of the card is the 6-pin PCIe power connection. The 6800 series are not the top of the line enthusiast cards but mid range and as such they only support a two-card configuration as evidenced by the single Crossfire bridge connection.
The cooling solution used on the XFX HD 6850 Black Edition card is different from the heatpipe based solution used on the stock (Well not so stock) XFX HD 6850 in that it uses a Vapor Chamber based cooling solution. Sapphire has been using this solution on their cards for sometime and now AMD started using it on the HD 5970. The solution used by XFX fits under the shroud over the front of the card and from the outside it would be difficult to tell the heat pipe and Vapor Chamber equipped cards apart. That's the reason for the shroud needing to come off - so we can take a look at its implementation. The cooling solution is circular in design with a center mounted 80mm fan that pushed close to 52CFM at full speed with a noise penalty of 50dB max. The copper Vapor chamber is 50 x 63 x 3.5mm in size with a total of 40 grams of copper used in its construction. The MOSFETs for the power circuit of the card are covered with an aluminum heat sink that uses the airflow from the heat sink to keep this part of the circuit cool. In front of the aluminum heat sink you see the fully covered ferrite chokes and solid capacitors that help this card run cooler and more efficiently.The Black Edition HD 6850 is built using a 40nm build process. The HD 6850 uses a total of 960 Accelerated Parallel Processors, has 48 texture units, has 32 ROP units and features 1GB of GDDR5 memory running through a 256-bit bus. Base clock speeds for the HD 6850 are 775Mhz on the core and 1000Mhz on the memory, but the Black edition sees a steep 75Mhz bump in the core speed to 850Mhz and a bump to 1100MHz on the memory. The Memory ICs used on the Black Edition card are the same Hynix H5G01H24AFR-T2C modules used on the last couple HD 6800 series cards that I have looked at and are rated for operation at 1250Mhz.
Microsoft DirectX® 11
- AMD RadeonTM HD 6800 Series GPUs fully support Microsoft DirectX® 11, enabling the following:
- Tessellation allows for real-time rendering of ultra-realistic characters and an incredible level of detail with 3D images
- HDR Texture compression delivers an intense level visual detail without increasing graphics memory footprint with efficiency and incredible image quality
- Multi-threading support for DirectX® 11 accelerates rendering by leveraging all the CPU cores for overall faster gaming performance
- DirectCompute improves PC performance by taking on some or all of a DirectX® 11-enabled application’s processing load, freeing up the computer’s main processor to take on additional tasks
- Run multiple displays from a single graphics board and expand your gaming field of view across all displays
- Offload data parallel compute tasks from the CPU to GPU for improved performance and video playback.
- GDDR5 memory provides twice the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3 memory
- Multi-GPU support offers superior performance and scalability3
- 3rd Generation TeraScale Engine
- Massive arrays of on-chip compute units offer the latest in graphics functionality and performance
- More efficient process technology puts more transistors in less space
- Comprehensive OS support including Windows XP, Windows Vista, the very latest Windows 7 functionality and Driver support
- Native support for common transcoding instructions in each shader for motion estimation that accelerates video encoding
- Enjoy a full range of display options natively on the board, including dual-link DVI-I, DisplayPort and HDMI
- HDMI 1.4 support with Deep Color, 7.1 HighBitrate Audio, and 3D Stereoscopic support Dolby® TrueHD and DTS-HD Master AudioTM Support
- Support of content protected, high bandwidth, 7.1 channels of surround sound over HDMI
- AMD PowerPlayTM capabilities vary power characteristics based on usage load
- Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution and beyond and enjoy a more feature rich experience with enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3)
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