I’m sure not many would be bothered with this, since it’s just an entry-level card with a low-profile passive heatsink. Chiphell has posted some photos of what seemed to be reference card for AMD’s upcoming Radeon 6300 series entry level card. Codenamed “Caicos”, which is named after the Caicos Island, this will probably, be the replacement for current Radeon HD 5400 series cards.

The reference shows a low-profile passive heatsink sitting on a single slot black PCB card. Low-profile passive heatsink, with the single-PWM proves that this is definitely the lowest end possible in the upcoming 6k-series Radeon. It’s nice to see that even the budget-oriented siblings are getting black PCBs instead of some ugly yellow PCBs.

Specs are still too early to get speculated, as AMD might change them at any time. The card that you’re looking at has 650MHz for the core and 800MHz for the memory. Memory wise, it’s still using a 1GB of GDDR3 with 128-bit bus interface, instead of the much superior GDDR5, perhaps to lower the cost. The memory has 25.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. Comparison wise, the current Radeon HD 5450 GPU has identical core speed and memory speed, but the memory bandwidth only reaches 12.8 GB/sec.

One thing to note is that this card that we’re looking at right now only have HDMI and DVI output. What’s more, the PCB seemed rather small compared to conventional PCI-Express slot cards in ATX casing. This probably means the “Caicos” might be aimed at HTPC and small form factor systems like the eMachines EL-series desktop. Capability to churn out Full HD videos with no sweat, coupled with passive heatsink and small form PCB means that this will be AMD’s next big hit for HTPC crowds, if what we’re looking at here is real. But I’m sure the Caicos won’t only be in this ‘miniature PCB’ form.

SOURCE via Chiphell