14 DAY TRIAL // Even though most of its creations haven't reached Europe or the US, AFOX has developed quite a few interesting graphics cards in the last couple of years, but few of them are more impressive than the low-profile AMD Radeon HD 6850 based solution the company recently started selling in Japan.
AFOX's latest creation carries the part number AF6850-1024D5L and was designed to be used in compact HTPC systems and other half-height desktops that require high graphics performance.
In on order to achieve this feat, AFOX had to redesign both the PCB and the cooling system of the card, and the latter is using a dual-slot aluminum heatsink that seems to make contact not only with the Barts Pro GPU, but also with the memory chips and VRM.
The heat gathered by the heatsink is then dissipated with the help of two low-diameter fans that stand at either sides of the aluminum block.
Even more impressive than the cooling system is the fact that AFOX has somehow managed to build the card so that it won't require any additional power except for the 75W that are provided via the PCI Express x16 slot.
How they managed to achieve this remains a mystery as the Barts GPU, used for the Radeon HD 6850, has an estimated power consumption of about 127W in load, so such cards usually require an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector to be installed.
Furthermore, the card is based on a fully working version of the HD 6850 core and it sticks to AMD's reference clocks that put the core at 775MHz and the GDDR5 memory at 1GHz (4GHz effective).
As far as the graphics card's video outputs are concerned, their layout had to be tweaked so that they would all fit considering the limited space available, but AFOX has still managed to cram a dual-link DVI and a DisplayPort connector.
The AFOX low-profile Radeon HD 6850 is available for purchase in Japan for 19,480 Yen, which translates into about $250 US. The card is shipped together with a low profile shim. (via Akiba PC Hotline!)
