Sapphire HD 6850 Pro Reviews

Radeon HD 6850 is not a high-end card but rather a product made with medium budgets in mind, the so called Gamers’ sweet spot card. The card hit the shelves at the end of October last year with priced at around €150. As you can see, the price is still the same.

Overall, the performance of the cards were pretty much in line with our expectations. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 like the MSI and Gigabyte cards before it was just too unexciting. Apart from the effective custom cooler and decent overclocking potential, the card has little else going for it. Furthermore, it is also slightly costlier than the MSI and Gigabyte duo.

This is an outstanding card for the money. At worst, it'll cost slightly less than the GTX 460, despite being marginally faster. Should the actual price turn out to be £10-£15 cheaper again, that makes this incredible value. Performance is great, and the features set is at least on a par with that of the GTX 460, bar the 3D support, which may be compensated for by excellent Eyefinity multi-screen options). Unless you're a real game freak, you really don't need to spend more than this.

The Toxic Edition card looks good and is larger than the reference design but is still a manageable size at 9.5 inches in length. It kicks all of the hot air outside the chassis so you don't have to worry about heating up the air inside your case any higher than it already happens to be. The temperatures delivered by the Toxic HD 6850 were not as cool as I would have liked but well within the thermal boundaries at 77C under load when the driver controls the fan speed, and 66 degrees Celsius when overclocked and the core is overvolted to 1.3v. The blower fan is far from being as noisy as the reference HD 6870 but is noticeable when you ramp the speed up to 100%. There is a fine line where the benefits of the fan speed are outweighed by the noise penalty but that really all comes down to personal preference and is really subjective. So I will leave that up to the end user but at 72~73% of max RPM, noise versus cooling efficiency is a fair trade off.

Performance across the board is down. This isn’t a surprise as the card carries less Shaders which is only going to have a negative impact on performance. There’s one thing we needed to really know today, though; have any games gone from “playable”, or in other words, having minimums of over 30 FPS and averages of over 60 FPS, to “unplayable”, or in other words, having numbers below those ones just mentioned?

Overall I consider the Sapphire 100315L Radeon HD 6850 to be a noteworthy PC gaming product, stereoscopic 3D or otherwise, but overclockers could be disappointed with the lack of headroom and Sapphire's internally-exhausted cooling solution. This is AMD's first self-branded video card, retiring nearly twenty years of ATI brand name recognition, so while it's done well to demonstrate modest mainstream performance capabilities there are still a few green areas. I'm not convinced the Radeon HD 6850 is going to impress consumers with improved Eyefinity support or added stereoscopic 3D functionality until these technologies become more mature, but this doesn't hold back the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 from delivering solid mid-range gaming performance.

Getting your head around the fact that the HD 6850 doesn’t replace the HD 5850 takes a bit of time. If you go in thinking that this is going to be an upgrade from your HD 5850 you’re going to be disappointed. This is ultimately what would mark the biggest problem with the series at the moment; the naming scheme gives an illusion that it replaces the HD 5800 series. Really, the HD 6850 doesn’t replace anything, and speaking to a friend of mine, we kind of came to the conclusion that if anything, the HD 6850 is a tweaked HD 5850 with a better price tag and lower power draw. When I say tweaked, I mean in the sense that AA performance seems to have been fixed in some spots, but more importantly Tessellation performance has increased.