AMD Radeon HD 6850 Launch Day: Meet Barts PRO

AMD Radeon HD 6850 reference board

AMD’s Radeon HD 6850 is a limited version of the Radeon HD 6870: two SIMD engines have been disabled. What does it mean? Simply that the Barts PRO GPU, hidden behind the VGA cooler of the HD 6850, features 960 scalar processors instead of 1120 for the HD 6870 (each SIMD engine has 80 scalar processors). The Radeon HD 6850 is priced at USD $179.

Specifications

Here are the official specifications of the HD 6850:

• GPU: Barts PRO @ 775MHz, 1.7 billion transistors, TSMC 40nm
• Scalar processors: 960
• Memory: 1024MB GDDR5 @ 1000MHz real speed (4000MHz effective), 256-bit (see HERE) for memory speed details)
• Color ROPs: 32
• Texture units: 48
• TDP: 127W (idle: 19W)
• Power connectors: one 6-pin
• 3D APIs: OpenGL 4 and Direct3D 11
• GPU Computing: OpenCL 1.0, DirectCompute 11

Some HD 6850 come with 1120 shader processors enabled…

For performances (OpenGL and Direct3D) just jump to the Radeon HD 6870 article.

We can all the same mention the OpenGL 4 tessellation score with TessMark (normal tessellation mode: X16):

Single HD 6850, source

HD 6850 in Crossfire, source

And here is the score in ShaderToyMark:

Single HD 6850, source

Power consumption and GPU temperature

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You can find other tests with FurMark HERE and HERE.

Radeon HD 6850 Specific Reviews

• XFX HD6850 CrossFireX review @ KitGuru
• ASUS Radeon HD 6850 Direct CU 1 GB @ TPU
• HIS Radeon HD 6850 1 GB @ TPU
• AMD Radeon HD 6850 Barts Video Card @ Benchmark Reviews

Radeon HD 6850 Round-up

HD 6850 VGA cooler seems to be a great source of inspiration for our graphics card makers…

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