Some naughty monkey has broken their NDA by sharing AMD's slides with everyone. If you know anything about making charts and graphs, then some of these slides are pretty damn hilarious. Check out the graph that begins at .8 and then increases in .1 increments up to 1.7. If you only look at the bars you may think that the performance of the HD 6850 is way more than twice as good as the GTX 460 because the red bars are more than twice as tall. However, when you factor in the scale you will see that the tallest red bar is just over 1.6 times faster than the GTX 460.

The HD 6800 series reviews are in and they are in your e-stores. The most important thing about this launch is that AMD has screwed with the meaning of their 800 series. The 6800s have been designed to be mid range cards instead of top range cards. People who are not aware of this change will assume that the HD 6800 cards are much faster than the GTX 460 and GTX 470. According to what I've read both cards are indeed faster than both GTX 460 models but the HD 6870 only trades blows with the GTX 470. Depending on the game, sometimes the GTX 470 wins, and sometime the HD 6870 wins.

One more thing that I want to point out is some new connectors that the HD 6870 is sporting. The reference HD 6870 comes with two mini DisplayPort version 1.2 connectors, one HDMI 1.4a connector and two DVI connectors of which one is single link, the other dual-link. Check out the middle of this page at PC Perspective to see all the connection possibilities these connectors allow.  

AMD Radeon HD 6000 series

All the HD 6870s out there right now have stock cooling, but here are the sexiest HD 6850s that I've seen so far:

The w1zzards at techPowerUp show what they can do with their internal GPU Tool software and Bjorn3D managed such a high memory overclock on their HD 6850 that I thought it was a typo. Not many of the HD 6850s can reach the HD 6870's reference core speed, but all of them passed 4,200Mhz on the memory.