AMD's first video card in the new HD 6xxx series occupies a brand new position in their video card product hierarchy. The Cypress chip, as used on the Radeon HD 5830 with 334 square millimeters of silicon, was way too big for just 1120 shaders and 16 ROPS. The new Barts GPU uses just 255 mm2 to do the same job only better, with twice the number of ROPs. Although AMD was denied the opportunity to roll out 32nm-based chips for this product cycle, they went back to the drawing board and optimized this new generation of GPUs for the current 40nm manufacturing process at TSMC. AMD did a better job of interpreting the rule book last time out, and their full line of 40nm GPUs stayed out in front for a full 6 months. AMD has successfully introduced an addition class of GPU (as defined by die size), to fill the performance gap that existed within the 5xxx series. You may have seen some benchmarks already, but please follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we take a complete look, inside and out, at the MSI R6870-2PM2D1GD5 graphics card.