
Depending on your motherboard setup and orientation, you may lose a slot either above or below the card, depending on how it is mounted.
#XFX RADEON HD 6850 REVIEW FREE#
You will need one PCI Express 2.1 x 16 (that would be the BIG one with the funny tab on the end) per card, and two free brackets. While not exactly Plug and Play, the 6850 is not Plug and Scream either. I could write for days about the performance increase over my old 5750, or even over my Hybrid Crossfire setup, how well it performs on the various games I play and so forth but plenty of folks already have. With the addition of AMD’s various performance control technologies, this card can be pushed hard and come back asking for more.

Incorporating a vapor chamber, which is essentially flattened heatpipes sitting between the GPU and heatsink, along with a fairly beefy fan, the card easily stays within tolerable ranges in even the most demanding of applications. XFX uses an fairly uncommon solution for cooling in cards of this price range. On the hardware side, the card requires a 6 pin power connector, and has 2 DVI, 1 HDMI and 1 Display Port connectors. Other features include DirectX 11 support, OpenGL, CrossfireX (with bridge) and Eyefinity support. This already bodes well for other models of the card, and even greater speeds are possible when using AMD’s Catalyst Control Center to ramp the card up for gaming. The Black Edition is a little different from other models of the lineup, in that it comes with a factory overclock setting the GPU at 820 MHz and its 1 GB of GDDR5 Memory at a respectable 1100 MHz over the 7 MHz, stock speeds. The particular model reviewed here is the XFX Radeon HD 6850 Black Edition. It’s relatively easy to use and perhaps the only complaint I could have about it is it doesn’t know my name or make toast. Hardware benchmarks and technological facts are great, but you want to know two things: Does it do what it is supposed to do? Is it afforabable? The answer to both of those questions is yes. Sure there are newer and faster cards out there, but they cost more money. AMD’s Radeon HD 6850 has been out for a bit, but it is a strong competitor given its relatively high performance with a sub $200.00 price tag. You need the whole package, but graphics is the place to start. You can buy better CPUs, more RAM, larger or faster Hard Drives but without decent graphics it’s basically like putting high quality octane in a clunker. For gamers, one of the most important upgrades to consider is the graphics card.

#XFX RADEON HD 6850 REVIEW 1080P#
In fact you're not only limited to the moderate 1,680 x 1,050 resolution with this card - it will do pretty well at powering a proper 1080p HD monitor.With multiple releases inbound, it’s certainly time to turn an eye towards upgrades. This then is a serious gamer's graphics card for a bargain price. That may not sound like a lot, but is actually a pretty significant score. The famously system-taxing tessellating monster, Metro 2033, almost managed to get up to 20fps with all the good stuff maxed out.
#XFX RADEON HD 6850 REVIEW FULL#
Indeed, we almost managed to hit 50fps in DiRT 3 and could even get the beautiful Shogun 2 above 30fps in the full HD res of 1,920 x 1,080. It means at the more reasonable resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 there's barely a game out there you can't top 30fps on the highest graphical settings. That's the GPU equivalent of turning the amp up to 11. Thanks to the smaller chip size AMD has managed to squeeze some extra megahertz out of the silicon, that 50MHz bonus however doesn't make up for the shortfall in unified shaders, but still makes it a quality performer for the cash.Īt the ludicrous 30-inch resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 the HD 6850 manages to get into double figures in Heaven 2.5 and that's with the tessellation settings on 'extreme'.
