Triplex has done something that a number of us have been awaiting for quite a long time: a single-slot, air-cooled graphics card. Usually, these days if you want a single-slot graphics card, the only way to accomplish this is to liquid cool the card, and bring the bulk to another place in your PC with a radiator.
Triplex' Radeon HD 7850 will perform like a reference card because its specifications follow the AMD reference list. It has a base clock speed of 860 MHz and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory running over a 256-bit memory interface at an effective speed of 4.8 GHz. The card though, doesn't have any power connectors, and thus can only consume up to 75 W from the PCIe x16 slot. The low power consumption is likely why Triplex was able to cool the card with just a single-slot cooler.
Then there's the bad news: the card will only be sold through OEM channels, meaning that it will not be available by itself to consumers directly through retail.
