The first time I laid eyes on this card I was visiting AMD's headquarters in Sunnyvale before the Radeon HD 5800 series launch event. I could take photos of the 6 displays it was driving, but not the card itself. So we'll start off with a picture of the things that set the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition card apart from its 3-display counterpart.

The most obvious changes are the display outputs. While your standard 5870 has two DL-DVI, one DisplayPort and one HDMI output, the Eyefinity 6 Edition has six mini Display Port connectors.

You can further convert two of those DP outputs into any combination of DVI, HDMI (only one can be HDMI) and VGA. The remaining four connectors must remain Display Port due to the limited number of timing sources on the 5870. The card will come with two mini DP to DP adapters, 2 passive mini DP to SL-DVI dongles and one passive mini DP to HDMI dongle.

Clock speeds have not changed. The GPU still runs at 850MHz core and the memory runs at a 1.2GHz clock speed (4.8GHz data rate). Memory size did change however, the Eyefinity 6 Edition card ships with 2GB of GDDR5 to accommodate the resolutions this thing will be driving. As 256MB GDDR5 is still not available for mass production (and won't be until later this year), AMD is using 16 x 128MB GDDR5 chips in 16-bit mode.

AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 Stream Processors 2x1600 1600 1600 1440 Texture Units 2x80 80 80 72 ROPs 2x32 32 32 32 Core Clock 725MHz 850MHz 850MHz 725MHz Memory Clock 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 Memory Bus Width 2x256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit Frame Buffer 2x1GB 2GB 1GB 1GB Transistor Count 2x2.15B 2.15B 2.15B 2.15B TDP 294W 228W 188W 151W Manufacturing Process TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm Price Point $699 $479 $390-420 $300

As a result of the added memory, power consumption has also gone up slightly. The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition now requires both a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCIe power connector instead of the two 6-pin connectors of the stock 5870:

The extra memory and five adapters that you get in the box do come at a price. The Radeon HD 5870 E6 Edition is expected to retail for $479. That's $100 more than the MSRP of the 5870 but only $59 more than its actual street price. It remains to be seen what the street price of the 5870 E6 will end up being given that TSMC 40nm production is still limited with improved but not yet perfect yields. These cards should be available immediately.

Update 4/1/2010: Launch prices appear to have missed their target. We're seeing the 5870E6 sold out at $499, and in-stock elsewhere at $549. This puts it at an $80 premium over the reference 1GB 5870.