ColorFire have a go at custom dual-GPU
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
After Asus’s eye-melting custom dual GTX580 along with it’s pocket-burning price tag, ColorFire have a go at dual-GPU as well with an AMD edition entitled the Xstrom HD6850 X2 4GB.
I doubt any real introduction is needed, the name is rather self explanatory as well, but for a proper presentation, we shall see what this is.
The Xstorm is basically two Radeon HD6850 GPUs on a single PCB equipped with a total of 4GB memory, the equivalent of 2GB per GPU. Now as for the components used on this custom building go, well you know what they say, don’t judge a book by its cover, and this specific cover is rather deceiving.
The inside is rather ‘unique’ to say the least, you don’t find what you’d expect. This graphic card was designed according to a “Silver-Plated Technology”, which is actually being tried on this specific product. The thinking behind it is that all the PCB’s metal-exposed parts onto which components are soldered, excluding the PCIe and CFBE, are plated with silver which would both reduce resistance and help with the cooling.
Other than that ColorFire has also included some DIP-switched based voltage control with the measurement points placed on a convenient location and in a way that facilitates access (next to the power connectors). You also get a pair of jumpers to allow for switching between two sets of EEPROMs, each of which containing a different profile for both the clock and voltage. The switch itself is also in an easy-to-access location, near the display output connectors.
As for the GPU, the PCB is fitted with two of AMD’s 40nm Barts GPUs for a total of 1920 stream processor (960 per GPU), all of which takes power from two 8-pin connectors with a 12-phase VRM taking care of the voltage regulation. The entirety of this setup is cooled using another of ColorFire’s custom cooler featuring a dual-fan setup on a large heatsink with five heat-pipes.
As for the EEPROMs profiles, other than the AMD stock, ColorFire didn’t mention anything about it, neither did it mention any price of release date, although I would hazard a guess in saying you won’t have to burn a hole through your pocket for this one.
