An Australian e-tail/retail shop has listed Sapphire's HD 6000 offer and even claims that both of the cards are currently in stock. It is also interesting to see that, at least Sapphire, will have a non-reference HD 6850 from day one.
The Sapphire HD 6870 is similar to what we've seen before and we are looking at a reference based card with a dual-slot blower fan. This one is currently listed at AU $339.90 or around US $330. The HD 6850 is a different story as this one is based on Sapphire's own design and we are looking at a dual-slot card that has rather big centre placed fan, heatpipes, and it is probably based on Vapor chamber technology, something that Sapphire has used on its HD 5800 cards. This one is selling for AU $275 or US $270.
The listed non-reference HD 6850 also features a rather unique output configuration, as this one probably uses the HD 5800 series PCB so it sticks to two DVI, one HDMI and standard DisplayPort outputs, rather than the new configuration that we've seen on reference HD 6800 cards. We are quite sure that Sapphire will have a handful of cards and that we will see some more once AMD officially lifts the NDA on Friday 22nd.
You can find the listings here.
