Introduction

In October last year, AMD released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The time spent between HD 5000 and HD 6000 was used 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.

With the HIS HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo, the company is introducing a new heatsink design. The IceQ X cooler uses blue transparent plastic to convey an image of "frozen iceblock" to the user. "Turbo" in the name stands for higher clocks out of the box, which are well increased compared to the AMD reference design.