A Closer Look

The cooler in use on the HD 6850 uses two heatpipes and a copper baseplate to move heat away from the GPU core quickly to the cooler's fins where it gets dissipated in the airflow.
A simple metal heatsink handles the job of cooling the voltage regulator circuitry.


A single 6-pin power connetor is required, this is plenty for the HD 6850 in stock configuration. With some overclocking it might be possible to exceed the 150 W limit of this configuration, but almost all power supplies can handle a bit more current just fine.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


The HD 6800 Series is the first product where we see the use of CHiL's CHL8214 voltage regulator. It supports voltage control via I2C and comes with extensive monitoring and tweaking features.


AMD's new Barts graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 1.7 billion transistors on a die area of 255 mm². This is also the first GPU to carry the AMD logo instead of the ATI logo.