We believe you need to spend at least £100 on a graphics card for proper gaming performance. AMD's Radeon HD 6850, currently priced at £120-plus, makes a compelling case to be included in any mid-range build. It's significantly faster than a Radeon HD 6790 or GeForce Ti 550, so it's no wonder AMD's band of partners have been keen to launch multiple models around the GPU.
PowerColor is bringing a new twist to the Radeon HD 6850 1GB. Rather than toe the reference line with a dual-slot cooler, which is how every other card is presented, the company is launching it in a single-slot form factor.
What's impressive here is that PowerColor doesn't meddle with the base frequencies of 775MHz core and 4,000MHz memory for this 127W TDP board. The low-profile cooler uses three 8mm-thick heatpipes that sit within a card-wide heatsink. The design means that the hot air is pushed out into the chassis rather than the rear, but there's no real way around that with this type of cooling.
Outputs-wise, there's dual-link DVI, full-sized HDMI and a couple of DisplayPort v1.2 connectors, meaning that four displays can be driven at once, assuming you have the appropriate inputs or dongles in place.
We reckon this card makes sense if you have space-constrained conditions - in a small-form-factor PC, for example - or need to use three or four of these cards in a regular motherboard for either computational tasks or multi-GPU gaming by way of CrossFireX.
PowerColor says that this card will attract a $20 premium over regular HD 6850 cards. With the rather large assumption of that being true, a sub-£150 price doesn't sound too bad, does it?
