Wednesday, October 20th 2010
AMD Radeon HD 6850 PCB Pictured
Barely a couple of days ahead of its launch, the first picture of the Radeon HD 6850 taken apart made its way to the internet. We were treated to the pictures of the HD 6870 PCB last week. AMD's release-grade reference design PCB is not as long as that of the HD 6870, it keeps up with the black color, and is available as either a premium 8-layer version, or a cost-effective 6-layer one. This particular one makes use of a 4+1+1 phase VRM, a CHIL-made VRM controller that might support software voltage control, power input from a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector, one CrossFire connector, and display connectivity that includes two DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors. From the information available to us from recent reports, the Radeon HD 6850 has 960 stream processors 32 ROPs, 48 TMUs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 1 GB of memory. Its core is clocked at 775 MHz, and memory at 1000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).
Source:
HardwareLuxx.de
32 Comments on AMD Radeon HD 6850 PCB Pictured
:laugh:Amazon has the Diamond 6850 listed here. Usually they let you preorder but that doesn't seem to be available..........yet.
For whomever asked, yes the pci-e connectors can carry more than their rated spec, but I highly doubt AMD would use 1 connector if overclocking at stock voltage would surpass 150W...That's just how they play the game.
960sp should be a sweet spot (ie pretty great perf/clock scaling) and AMD's TMUs are more efficient than nVIDIA's; 6850 should be a pretty impressive product.
It appears to have similar performance per clock to GTX 460 with one less power connector, and likely higher obtainable core and mem speeds considering AMD's past 40nm designs. After-all it will use 5Gbps memory according to most things I've seen, and AMD has undoubtedly a better memory controller than nVIDIA which can scale to that speed even with the lowered mem voltage on the past 50 products. Evergreen core designs hit 925-950 before requiring heavy voltage/massive power consumption, granted they were capable of 1ghz+, and I imagine this again will be similar. The '70' versions stock voltages already are at that sweet spot, and the default 6870 clock reflects that. I doubt there is much room left in it at stock. The 6850 though, I imagine performs similar to past '50' products (1.05v vs 1.15v on 70 products) and will clock to approx. 825-850 on stock volts and likely still be under the 150W of the spec considering 900mhz is only 151W.
Basically, I want to see a slightly v-adjusted 6850 @ 900+/~5000. When 6850 comes down in price (after 5800 series stock is cleared) to compete with the 460 768MB, I imagine they will be a pretty great deal.