Review: AMD Radeon HD 6850 face-off - ASUS vs Sapphire vs PowerColor

Temperatures

Three high-end Fermi cards struggle to keep the temps below 95°C. The Gigabyte is more power-hungry than the Radeons, sure, but the excellent cooler keeps the GPU under 65°C. The trio of Radeons all perform in close proximity to one another.

Really crank up the load and the trio are still hard to separate. Interestingly and surprisingly, the stock cooler on a reference HD 6850 beats them all out, and the Gigabyte SOC is 10°C better than the ASUS HD 6850 card.