Gadgetory

today we're going to be unboxing something very exciting from AMD and actually it's funny that I should say from AMD because right here you can see they've actually changed the branding finally AMD acquired ATI way long time ago but now finally instead of ATI Radeon graphics it is now officially AMD Radeon Grasset graphics as of the 6000 series so this is the Radeon 6870 which is one of the first two Radeon 6000 series graphics cards it supports up to four displays in AMD eyefinity so that's an increase of one more display from the 58 70 series okay so that means you can run to off of the display ports so those are two mini DisplayPort and then two off of DVI or HDMI so you've got a total of three connectors there let's turn this over and we'll have a look at what it's got to say about itself on the box so this is an msi card that means they've got a lot on here about MSI Afterburner which allows you to overclock and do optimal fan profiles all that good stuff afterburners an awesome piece of software you've probably seen me use it on my blog a lot of times it's got solid caps which means up to ten years of lifetime they actually calculated out to twelve years assuming you're actually gaming 24/7 for all 12 years here's a couple of highlighted features which I guess I'll sort of I'll talk about that briefly while I open the box and we'll have a look at this card right away because to be perfectly honest with you I have not seen this I have never seen one of these cards this is going to be my first time just like you nice sticker actually okay so there it is that is the Radeon HD 6870 and then here and then I'm just going to lay this out for you to sort of for cameraman to look at while I tell you a little bit more about it so in terms of we already talked about the displays out so we have support for AMD of Evo that's their HD video and display technology we've got crossfire X okay we've got only one crossfire finger up there so that means we've only got two week crossfire not 3-way crossfire we have affinity technology with support for up to three displays hold on a minute pause the video blu-ray movie acceleration by the way that looks like a typo on the features of the box because it does support for displays it's compliant with DirectX 11 which we already have come to expect and it is designed for direct compute 5.0 and OpenCL windows 7 support is a given and it can accelerate office 2010 applications it supports HDMI 1.4 a which means that you do have support for blu-ray 3d playback with the appropriate software so let's start moving this card around and have a look at it so as I mentioned before we've got one crossfire finger up here at the top for up to two way crossfire so you can run 268 70s in a crossfire configuration you've got a really slick looking shroud on here so this part is actually metal so what I'm going to go ahead and speculate actually here maybe I can see through that um no I can't really can't really see in there but I would speculate that this piece of metal is actually cooling some of the RAM chips on the front of the card and then it turns into plastic at this seam right here as far as I can tell and so that's just a plastic fan shroud you've got two 6-pin PCI Express connectors and then moving around to the back of the card you've got a continuation of that pattern that's just going to look really really sharp in your case whether you have a case with that where the graphics cards are installed this way or one where you've got your motherboard tray on the other side and installs this way it just looks really good alright so let's move around to the business end of the card where we have two DVI connectors one HDMI connector now just like the 55,000 series you can only use two of these at a time if you want for displays that means that two of them will be powered by the mini DisplayPort connectors which you find here much like the 5870 it has only a half exhaust at the back of the i/o panel so that means that all of the air will have to be exhausted out that small hole with the 5000 series it didn't have a huge impact on the cooling performance so I wouldn't worry too much about it for this one because I'd say based on the overall weight of the car the dimensions of the cooler the size of the fan it's probably got pretty similar thermal characteristics to the last generation card on the back we find a slick black PCB now one thing that might seem like it's missing from a 6870 card is like a shroud on the back but you got to remember the 6800 series is not the equivalent of the 5800 series in terms of where it belongs in the AMD lineup this is actually going to be a performance like a performance card but not an extreme card this isn't the highest end series so let's go ahead and put this down and let's take out what we have in here in terms of accessories so first we had a quick user's guide then we have a driver disk which you may actually need to use depending on when AMD releases the drivers on their site okay driver utility then we had a mini DisplayPort to display port adapter so that will allow you to at least run Eyefinity with three displays if you don't have any mini DisplayPort monitors or adapters then you've got two molex to PCIe 610 power connectors you've got one crossfire bridge which is all you will need and you had a DVI to VGA adapter if you are still using a VGA monitor last but not least we've got a 6800 series well another Quick Start Guide by the look of things shows you how to update your drivers using their live update so there you have it the 6800 or 6800 series 6870 from MSI and we're going to be doing a ton of videos about this guy power consumption length review all that good stuff so stay tuned