Confirmed info on Radeon HD 6870 and 6850

At last, AMD has announced the final release date for HD 6870 and HD 6850 graphic cards. Its 22nd of October 2010. Earlier, it was planned to be launched on 12th of October, but AMD postpone the release for a week, till 19th, however, this was not the final date too.

Based on Barts, both graphic cards represent the Mid-High end sector and are to replace HD 57xx cards. Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 wiil carry 1GB GDDR5 and HDMI,DVI-I, DVI-D outputs. Apart from that, HD 6870 will also have Dual mini DisplayPort outputs, whereas HD 6850 will only have one DisplayPort.

Another good news, HD 6870 is confirmed to run at 900MHz for GPU while memory will operate at 1050MHz. The card will have two-slot cooling system and will require additional power drown through two six pin power connectors. And don’t forger CrossFire support and 256-bit memory controller.

According to info of some Chinese websites the performance of HD 6870 will be slightly greater than HD 5850. But don’t worry as there is also Cayman, which will bring us top High-end VGAs and which is most likely to happen this years fall.
The retail price for Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 in US is expected to be approximately $250, while in Europe it is possible to start at 250 euro. The cards will start shipping the next week.

Updated

Though, there is almost a week left before the actual release of Radeon HD 6800 series, new information leaks starting to appear.
This time we get to see the picture of the Barts die.

It is of rectangular shape and rotated 45 degrees. Moreover, Barts has almost the same package as Cypress since Barts is pin-compatible with it. Compared to Cypress (184.18×183.49=337.95 mm2), Barts die size is nearly 1.5 time smaller.

In addition, new drivers supporting Radeon HD 6800 cards has leaked at Station-Drivers. Strange driver named Catalyst 1x.x has passed WHQL certification and is dedicated for newly coming Radeon HD 6800 Series as driver inf file have the following strings.

“Radeon HD 6800 Series” = ati2mtag_NI, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_6738
“Radeon HD 6800 Series” = ati2mtag_NI, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_6739

News on HD 6850 specs features it having 800 SP which is twice as less than in Cypress, 775 MHz for GPU clock and 1GB of GDDR5 at 1000 MHz via 256-bit bus which reminds us of HD 5850. The price of HD6850 is expected to start at $175-$180 but won’t likely go over $200. So this make it a good price/performance rival against NVIDIA GTX 460 1 GB graphic card.

In addition

Here are the first true photos of HD 6800 cards.

XFX HD 6870:

XFX HD 6850:

Still waiting for true performance results.

Source: VR-zone, Fudzilla