Sapphire TOXIC HD 6850 Pro Reviews

Even though it runs a bit hotter than the other cards we looked at it still performed just as well as they did at its factory over clocked settings. Some others said they were able to get this card over the 1GHz mark; I wasn't able to but it didn't matter. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card still ran great.

Sapphire launched two Barts Pro GPU based graphics cards – Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6850 Toxic. We’re talking about cards from AMD’s second DX11 generation dubbed Northern Islands. Sapphire HD 6850 Radeon Toxic currently goes for €160, here.

Coming to the 820MHz/4,400MHz-clocked Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 TOXIC first, it is designed to be overclocked from the get-go. A Radeon HD 6870 PCB is complemented by two six-pin PCIe connectors, twin mini-DP v1.2 ports, and a chunky heatsink. Sapphire also includes its easy-to-use TRIXX overclocking utility, which we used to push the card to the highest frequencies in our HD 6850 face-off. While checking all the tickboxes on the spec. sheet rather nicely, the card's cooler isn't as good as it first appears

Overall, the performance of the cards were pretty much in line with our expectations. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Edition emerges top in this roundup as it edges the rest of the cards by a hair’s breadth. In stock form, the card isn’t that much quicker than a reference clocked Radeon HD 6850, a problem which the two other overclocked cards (PowerColor and XFX) also exhibited. But we were pleased with the efficiency of its cooler and also its amazing overclocking performance as it managed to attain an outstanding 1010MHz at the core. All in all, the cards are decent takes on the Radeon HD 6850 and they are all pretty evenly matched, but the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Edition stood out thanks to its outstanding overclocking performance.

The extra clockspeed translates directly into more frames per second, and the customised heatsink is quiet and good looking. Sapphire's overclocking app gives you plenty of control for getting even more out of the card, too. It still doesn't feel right recommending any HD 6850 variant without the usual price caveats. It's a good card, but the GTX 460 and HD 5850 would be the logical choices with this much to spend.

The Toxic Edition video cards from Sapphire have always had that extra something special that sets them apart from the crowd. That something is usually a deviation from the reference design, which includes PCB improvements as well as better component and cooling selections. Add to that the increased clock speeds and you have a card that provides performance above that of its AMD competitor's reference designs.

Sapphire and PowerColor have the best-performing graphics cards, but who has the best performance-value? If this was a System Builder Marathon, I’d probably go with two Sapphire Toxic 6850 cards for their externally-vented design. Pushing graphics heat out of the case would allow a more aggressive CPU overclock, and the CPU is a big bottleneck in multiple-GPU configurations.

If you’re a fan of the TOXIC series and you’re looking for something to replace your HD 5830 or lower, this is going to be a great card. If you’re not interested in doing the overclocking yourself this is also another great card as Sapphire has given us a nice bump in clock speeds.