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. Just 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 cards, 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 affinity, for example. Some monitor
stands, two or three times moni. I'm glad they had this brochure in
here. Some low profofile kits for their graphics cards. All the power supplies.
We mentioned that already. Specs and like little internal like
cutouts. That's nice. It's useful, you know. All right. We've got a door
hanger. Do not disturb. I'm 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 uh
yeah. Yeah, they've updated it. Cool. So, 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 heat sinks without voiding your warranty as
long as you keep the original one. Driver CD install guide, throw it away. AMD graphics card, another disc, throw
it away. And quick install guide. If you've ever installed a graphics card
before, throw it away. Okay, nothing in
there. Seems like there's an error. Okay, next we have the Radeon 6850
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 6870s come with a reference cooler and
the 6850 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 uh which cooler they use on the 6850. So that means
we've got all kinds of unique designs. So you can see the XFX1 uses a flower
style heat sink 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 a Oh, words
fail me. I can't remember how many millimeters that looks like it is. That's a big heat pipe or rather two.
And then you can see there is a copper uh 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 uh card memory chips are not directly cooled. Although
they are all situated, you can see the memory chips here and uh 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 air flow. They've also cleverly shrouded the
cooler in such a way that when the air flow goes Okay, so you're pushing air
into the cooler. That means you're going to have a lot of incidental air flow
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 VRM and then carry that
heat out of the graphics card. You've got a six pin PCIe power connector here.
You've got Yeah, actually, you know what? I'm
totally wrong. Just like the 6870, the VRM are actually here. And there is a
little ventilation hole here in the shape of the XFX logo as you may or may
not have picked up on. Now, the 6850 has fewer connectors on the back panel. It
has two DVI, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort. The 6870 actually includes uh two
DVI, one HDMI, and two mini display
port. So, it's a slightly ah different
layout. There you 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 back
plate here holding on our GPU cooler. We've got a standard PCIe 16X interface.
Just like the 6870, the 6850 only supports two-way Crossfire, not
three-way Crossfire. And 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 Linus Tech Tips.