The day we’ve been waiting for since the past couple of months has finally arrived. AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, is out with its second-generation DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.

The new architecture also refines and expands on the product’s feature-set, giving the GPU an even bigger role to play in today’s PC than simply rendering 3D graphics: that’s accelerating smooth and crystal-clear high-definition video, and getting into CPU territory, by number-crunching for applications at a much more parallel scale than multicore processors.(..)

The ASUS EAH6850 DirectCu we’re reviewing today is ASUS’ in-house design implementation that sports its DirectCu (direct copper) GPU cooler, which has quite some credentials, making it to many performance-segment graphics cards from the company. The PCB is ASUS’ in house design, too, but borrows heavily from AMD’s essential reference design. ASUS is also giving you a small core clock bump, up to 790 MHz from the AMD reference clock of 775 MHz.

• READ MORE (Source): ASUS Radeon HD 6850 Direct CU 1 GB Review – Page 1/32 | techPowerUp