Gadgetory

now I did a lot of launch coverage on the Radeon 6870 but I had a bit of a realization today that I haven't even done an unboxing of the 6850 so let's get started here it's going to open up this XFX Radeon 6850 so here we are let's start getting this opened up and basically the Radeon 6850 has the same amount of RAM it has the same GPU on it as the 6870 it is a member of the same series of video card which is 6800 series and the only real difference is that it has a few less functional units and it's not quite as fast so oh yeah it's also cheaper I guess that's another factor so XFX has a little brochure in here about some of their products including their Pro Series some adapters and connectors that you might need if you're going to run eyefinity for example some monitor stands two or three times monitor I didn't even know AXA fantastic so I'm glad they have this brochure in here some low profile kits for their graphics cards all the power supplies we mentioned that already specs like little internal like cutout that's nice it's useful you know all right we've got a door hanger Do Not Disturb on gaming they've even updated it I have one of these with the old XFX dog on it or wolf or whatever it's supposed to be and yeah now they've updated it cool so there's some information on the North America limited lifetime warranty remember XFX includes a double lifetime warranty that means that even if you sell the card whoever you sell it to also gets a lifetime warranty they also have a modder friendly warranty which means you can install aftermarket heatsinks without voiding your warranty as long as you keep the original on driver CD install guide throw it away AMD graphics card another disk throw it away and quick install guide if you've ever installed a graphics card before throw it away ok nothing in there seems like Erik ok next we have the Radeon 68 50 itself now something that I want to point out is that this is not a reference cooler this is a reference board but this is not a reference cooler design the reference cooler you can actually see a reference 6870 here now why you might ask do 68 70s come with a reference cooler and the 68 50 does not and the reason is because AMD has decided that for this particular graphics card launch they are not going to limit board partners in terms of which graph which cooler they use on the 68 50 so that means we've got all kinds of unique designs so you can see the XFX one uses a flower style heatsink which looks like it has two large heat pipes so here I want you to have a look at that heat pipe in there that appears to be 8 Oh words fail me I can't remember how many millimeters that looks like it is but that's a big heat pipe or rather 2 and then you can see there is a copper core to the GPU cooler itself you can see that through there and then that runs out to aluminum fins which are doing most of the cooling work now I just want to kind of look down here it looks like the graphics card memory chips are not directly cooled although they are all situated you can see the memory chips here and you can kind of see them through there are all situated almost directly under the fan so you're going to get a lot of incidental airflow yet they've also cleverly shrouded the cooler in such a way that when the airflow goes okay so you're pushing air into the cooler that means you're going to have a lot of incidental airflow coming out this way and they've also put vents here at the back so you make sure that some of it is going to be able to run over the VRMs and then carry that heat out of the graphics card you've got a 6 pin PCI II power connector here you've got yeah actually you know what I'm totally wrong just like the 68 70 the RMS are actually here and there is a little ventilation hole here in the shape of the XFX logo and as you may or may not have picked up on now the 68 50 has fewer connectors on the back panel it has two DVI one HDMI and one DisplayPort the 6870 actually includes two DVI one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort so it's a slightly different layout they are let's just compare those really quick so this is more like the layout on the previous 5000-series cards we've got a backplate here holding on our GPU cooler we've got a standard PCIe 16x interface just like the 68 70 the 68 50 only supports two-way crossfire not 3-way crossfire I think that covers pretty much everything I wanted to say this is an 80 mil fan so it should operate very quietly thank you for checking out my unboxing of the XFX Radeon HD 6850 and don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips