IT APPEARS THAT secrets are only held for so long in this industry and pictures of two of AMD’s upcoming 6000-series graphics cards have made their way on to the world wide wobbly web. The boards in question is the entry level Caicos which is expected to be a Radeon HD 6300 cards and the Cayman which should end up being a Radeon HD 6800 part.
The pictures leaked on Chiphell, a Chinese site that has a history of leaking pictures of various unreleased graphics cards. The pictures of the Caicos cards offers plenty of details, including a GPU-Z screen shot which identifies the GPU as a 6779. What’s interesting is that AMD has moved away from a 64-bit memory interface and even this basic GPU gets support for 128-bit GDDR3 memory. The reference card uses four 256MB Hynix memory chips for a total of 1GB of GDDR3 memory, although we’ll leave out the clock speeds for now, as we’re not sure if they’re correct.
The card itself is a low-profile card and it even has a low profile bracket, something that we’ve never seen on a reference card from AMD/ATI in the past. It’s also a passively cooled card which is great news for all HTPC fans out there, although we were surprised to see the addition of vapour chamber cooling, as we would’ve thought a standard heatsink would’ve done the job. The card features a DVI and an HDMI 1.4 port and there’s what appears to be a space for a pin-header for a D-sub connector. Caicos is also said to support DisplayPort 1.2 and UVD3.
So what about the high-end then? Well, we don’t know nearly as much about this card. The picture doesn’t reveal all that many details, but what’s clear is that the card will still use two power connectors and that it’s a rather long card. AMD has also changed the port configuration slightly. The DisplayPort connector of the Radeon HD 5870 has been exchanged for two mini DisplayPort connectors. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially as there are very few DisplayPort monitors in the market at the moment. However, it seems like AMD is trying to push Eyefinity by adding support for 4-5 displays on its standard high-end cards.
Currently there’s a lot of speculation trying to figure out AMD’s graphics card line-up for the 6000-series, but until we see some more solid information we’ll leave it at that. We’d expect a few more leaks before AMD gets official on its new line-up of cards, but what’s leaked so far does at least give a glimpse into what to expect from AMD.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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