The MSI Radeon HD 6870 (Cont’d)
Contents
In Figure 4, you can see the video card with its cooler removed. Note how it requires two six-pin auxiliary power connectors. In Figures 5 you can see the cooler by itself. It has a copper base, three copper heatpipes, and a heatsink with aluminum fins.
Figure 4: Video card with the cooler removed
Figure 5: The GPU cooler
The reviewed card uses eight 1 Gbit GDDR5 chips, making its 1 GB video memory (1 Gbit x 8 = 1 GB). Each chip is connected to the GPU using a 32-bit data lane, making the video card’s 256-bit memory interface (32 bits x 8 = 256).
The chips used are H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C parts from Hynix, which support up to 1.25 GHz (4.5 GHz QDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 1.05 GHz (4.2 GHz QDR), there is a small margin for you to increase the memory clock rate while keeping the chips inside the maximum they support. Of course you can always try to overclock the memory chips above their specs.
Figure 6: Memory chips
This video card doesn’t come with any accessory or games.
Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.
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