Introduction

Last month, AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.

PowerColor's HD 6850 PCS+ is a fully custom HD 6850 design. It uses a different PCB, different voltage regulator and different thermal solution than the AMD reference version. The most important points for the HD 6850 PCS+ are a clock speed of 820 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory, which is 6% more on core and 10% more on memory.