A little over a year ago, AMD released the ATI Radeon HD 5000 family of graphics products and by doing so, AMD became the first company to offer DirectX 11 compatibility when Windows 7 was launched. This was a big deal and over the past year AMD has successfully released eleven video cards in the Radeon HD 5000 series and sold more than 25 million DX11 video cards.
What is really interesting is that NVIDIA is still releasing more cards in their GeForce 400 series of products. NVIDIA has just five DirectX 11 cards released and the company still does not have a solid top-to-bottom DirectX 11 product stack like AMD does. AMD on the other hand is going to be releasing their next generation of GPUs, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Graphics Series later this week. The first two cards that will be released will be the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics cards. Unlike in past years AMD won’t be starting with their flagship video cards, but rather a pair of cards that are positioned in the “Gamers’ Sweet Spot” as they like to call it.

AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 Video Cards

Today, we have the ability to tell you the product names of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series only, show you the photos of the AMD Radeon 6800 series cards and give you a peak at an upcoming demo AMD made called Mecha Rampage. Since we have already told you the product names, we’ll skip right to the pictures and let you take a sneak peak of the cards that we will be reviewing in-depth later this week.

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Reference Card

The Radeon HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 is the first video card in the new Radeon HD 6000 series that we will be showing you today. The Radeon HD 6800 series has a whole new look too it and while they kept the red/black color scheme the ‘batmobile’ look of the Radeon HD 5800 series is long gone.

This video card measures 9″ long and is a dual-slot card with a squirrel cage type cooling fan on it.

The back of the Radeon HD 6850 is open and doesn’t have any of the 1GB GDDR5 memory visible on this side of the PCB. The only thing worth noting here is the GPU support bracket that is also common on the current generation of video cards.
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The back of the Radeon HD 6870 is very similar to the Radeon HD 6850, but notice the GPU coolers fan shroud hangs over just a bit at the end of the card. The Radeon HD 6870 doesn’t have any GDDR5 memory visible on this side of the PCB either.
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READ MORE (Source): AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 Video Card Preview – The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Reference Card – Legit Reviews