ASUS debuts a customized Radeon HD 6870 in its DirectCU line of video cards. The EAH6870 DirectCU has a custom cooling solution, enhanced power circuitry, and a GPU frequency boost. We put it to the test against a reference Radeon HD 6870 and a GeForce GTX 470.

On October 21, 2010 AMD released a new generation of video cards for the midrange market. The two new video cards, the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850, are based upon an evolved version of the 5800 series. With this architecture, AMD has managed to improve performance while reducing transistor count and die size. All of this together means more performance with less heat and power.

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 is a little less powerful than the Radeon HD 6870 but at a targeted price of $179, it is also $60 less. The Radeon HD 6850 has a compute power of 1.5 (vs. 2.0 on the 6870) TFLOPs with a core clock speed of 775MHz (vs. 900MHz on the 6870) and 960 (vs. 1120 on the 6870) Stream Processors. They both have 32 ROPs and 1GB of GDDR5. The Radeon HD 6870 however has its memory clocked at 4.2GHz vs. 4GHz for the Radeon HD 6850.

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