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

by Tarinder Sandhu on 17 November 2010, 09:08 3.5

Tags: ASUSTeK (TPE:2357), PowerColor (6150.TWO), AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa24r

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ASUS Radeon HD 6850 DirectCu



The ASUS cooler is the only one of the trio not to span the length of the PCB. This will cause the warm air pushed away from the heatsink to remain the chassis.


Remove the heatsink and you see that ASUS isn't just espousing marketing-speak with the DirectCu cooler; the two heatpipes literally attach on to the Radeon HD 6850 GPU. The shape of the heatsink means that there is no direct contact with the memory chips underneath, though ASUS does provide a very small heatsink on the power-regulation components on the left-hand side.

A closer look at the PCB shows that ASUS uses the same Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2C (5Gbps) memory as the Sapphire and PowerColor cards.

Look to the right and the 9.5in PCB heritage becomes clear. It can take a second six-pin PCIe connector - a la Radeon HD 6870 - and we're a little surprised that ASUS didn't leave it on there, much like Sapphire, to aid overclocking efforts on this card.

Appreciating that AMD allows partners to specify a core speed of 820MHz core, which we feel that all HD 6850s are capable of, the shipping 790MHz is rather conservative.

The vent on the back is even less worthwhile than on the PowerColor card.

Twin heatpipes jut out of the side but don't prohibit the connection of a second card for two-way CrossFireX. See the empty space for a second six-pin PCIe connector?

In the vein of the other two cards, there's nothing of significance on the back. ASUS, though, does throw in its SmartDoctor software.

Version 5.66 brings support for the new Radeon cards. On top of the usual fan-monitoring and general tweaking options, ASUS provides GPU voltage adjustments from 0.95V to a rather toasty 1.35V, core speed ranges from 600MHz to 1,000MHz and the memory's from an effective 3,000MHz to 5,000MHz. In short, enough to get the most out of the card.

Like the other Radeon HD 6850 offerings, there are no games in the ASUS package, and this is one area where NVIDIA steals a march on AMD, by providing various free-to-download promotions for brand-new titles - H.A.W.X 2 and Mafia II being two recent examples on mid-range GeForces.


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