A Closer Look

The AMD reference design cooler is a heavy and capable solution. It uses a copper baseplate and three heatpipes to cool the GPU surface. An additional cooling plate is installed to cool the memory and voltage regulation circuitry.


The card requires two power connectors because it exceeds the 150W limit of a single 6-pin connector slightly. This means that thanks to the second connectors there is plenty of headroom for overclocking and overvolting.


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.