Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Graphics Card
Recently, the GTX 460 (tinyurl.com/3835b3q) has been very much in that bracket. Last month, ATI unveiled its worthy response: this mid-range HD 6850 and the Gold Award-winning 6870 reviewed last issue (tinyurl.com/2frLghy). But when the cards went on sale, a small price rise on the 6870 and a significant price drop on the GTX 460 resulted in the nVidia product offering better value.
At the time of writing, the ATI 6850 was available in large numbers for around £160, although some outlets were advertising it at £145 to £150. We’ll take £160 as the reference price – if you can get it for £150 or less, this card will offer even better value.
Core specifications
As the price suggests, the HD 6850 is very much a cut-down version of the 6870. In many respects, it retains much of what made the 6870 so impressive, though. And it’s even less demanding, needing just one 6-pin power connector and specifying a modest – for a graphics card, anyway – thermal design power (TDP) of 127W.
This early Sapphire version of the 6850 sticks very much to the factory settings, although an enhanced ‘Toxic’ version should be available by the time you read this. It lists 775MHz core and 1GHz (4GHz DDR-effective) memory-clock speeds, compared to the 6870′s respective figures of 900MHz and 1,050MHz (4.2GHz DDR-effective).
There’s a significant difference here, particularly when it comes to the core clock, and the 6850′s fill rates are noticeably down – 37.2 gigatexels per second (GTps) in the face of the 6870′s 50.4GTps. The 6850 is still competitive with the GTX 460, though, falling just behind the 37.8GTps notched up by the 1GB version of that chip.
The 6850 is closer to its sibling in terms of memory bandwidth, since both chips share a 256bit memory interface. The 6850′s score of 128GB per second (GBps) is only a short way behind the 6870′s 134.4GBps – and a long way clear of the GTX 460′s 115.2GBps.
Also worthy of note are the excellent features of ATI’s new Barts architecture. The HD 6850 has significantly advanced tessellation over previous ATI cards, and the Eyefinity multiscreen support has been improved. Indeed, this card comes with two DVI ports, plus HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. We’ll be excited to see how ATI’s new HD3D facilities fare.
In terms of performance, the 6850 falls only a short way behind the 6870. More crucially, though, it beats the similarly priced GTX 460 in every test. The difference is rarely more than a couple of frames.
In our Crysis test, for example, the 6850 notches up 27.8 and 22.9fps at 1680×1050 and 1900×1200 resolutions respectively. This places it between 0.4 and 0.8fps ahead of the GTX 460, and 0.9 to l.lfps behind the HD 6870. At 1280×720, it beats the GTX 460 by more than two frames.
In the Heaven benchmark, its figures of 27.6 and 23.8fps at the higher resolutions place it 0.9 to 1.3fps behind its big brother and 1 to 1.3fps ahead of the GTX 460.
In Stalker: Call of Pripyat, it finishes 0.7 to 0.9fps behind the HD 6870, and the same amount ahead of the GTX 460.
Verdict
The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 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 to £15 cheaper again, this would offer incredible value. Performance is great, and the feature set is at least on a par with that of the GTX 460 – bar the 3D support, which may be compensated for by the excellent Eyefinity multiscreen options. Unless you’re a real game freak, you really don’t need to spend more than this on a new graphics card.
Specification
ATI Radeon HD 6850; IGB GDDR5 RAM; 775MHz core clock; 1GHz memory clock (4GHz DDR-effective); 400MHz Ramdac; 256bit memory interface; 960 stream processors; 48 texture units; 32 ROP units; PCI Express; 1 x 6-pin power connector; DirectX 11.0; 2 x DVI; HDM; DisplayPort; 2-year warranty
Price £160
Recently, the GTX 460 (tinyurl.com/3835b3q) has been very much in that bracket. Last month, ATI unveiled its worthy response: this mid-range HD 6850 and the Gold Award-winning 6870 reviewed last issue (tinyurl.com/2frLghy). But when the cards went on sale, a small price rise on the 6870 and a significant price drop on the GTX 460 resulted in the nVidia product offering better value.
At the time of writing, the ATI 6850 was available in large numbers for around £160, although some outlets were advertising it at £145 to £150. We’ll take £160 as the reference price – if you can get it for £150 or less, this card will offer even better value.
Core specifications
As the price suggests, the HD 6850 is very much a cut-down version of the 6870. In many respects, it retains much of what made the 6870 so impressive, though. And it’s even less demanding, needing just one 6-pin power connector and specifying a modest – for a graphics card, anyway – thermal design power (TDP) of 127W.
This early Sapphire version of the 6850 sticks very much to the factory settings, although an enhanced ‘Toxic’ version should be available by the time you read this. It lists 775MHz core and 1GHz (4GHz DDR-effective) memory-clock speeds, compared to the 6870′s respective figures of 900MHz and 1,050MHz (4.2GHz DDR-effective).
There’s a significant difference here, particularly when it comes to the core clock, and the 6850′s fill rates are noticeably down – 37.2 gigatexels per second (GTps) in the face of the 6870′s 50.4GTps. The 6850 is still competitive with the GTX 460, though, falling just behind the 37.8GTps notched up by the 1GB version of that chip.
The 6850 is closer to its sibling in terms of memory bandwidth, since both chips share a 256bit memory interface. The 6850′s score of 128GB per second (GBps) is only a short way behind the 6870′s 134.4GBps – and a long way clear of the GTX 460′s 115.2GBps.
Also worthy of note are the excellent features of ATI’s new Barts architecture. The HD 6850 has significantly advanced tessellation over previous ATI cards, and the Eyefinity multiscreen support has been improved. Indeed, this card comes with two DVI ports, plus HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. We’ll be excited to see how ATI’s new HD3D facilities fare.
In terms of performance, the 6850 falls only a short way behind the 6870. More crucially, though, it beats the similarly priced GTX 460 in every test. The difference is rarely more than a couple of frames.
In our Crysis test, for example, the 6850 notches up 27.8 and 22.9fps at 1680×1050 and 1900×1200 resolutions respectively. This places it between 0.4 and 0.8fps ahead of the GTX 460, and 0.9 to l.lfps behind the HD 6870. At 1280×720, it beats the GTX 460 by more than two frames.
In the Heaven benchmark, its figures of 27.6 and 23.8fps at the higher resolutions place it 0.9 to 1.3fps behind its big brother and 1 to 1.3fps ahead of the GTX 460.
In Stalker: Call of Pripyat, it finishes 0.7 to 0.9fps behind the HD 6870, and the same amount ahead of the GTX 460.
Verdict
The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 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 to £15 cheaper again, this would offer incredible value. Performance is great, and the feature set is at least on a par with that of the GTX 460 – bar the 3D support, which may be compensated for by the excellent Eyefinity multiscreen options. Unless you’re a real game freak, you really don’t need to spend more than this on a new graphics card.
Specification
ATI Radeon HD 6850; IGB GDDR5 RAM; 775MHz core clock; 1GHz memory clock (4GHz DDR-effective); 400MHz Ramdac; 256bit memory interface; 960 stream processors; 48 texture units; 32 ROP units; PCI Express; 1 x 6-pin power connector; DirectX 11.0; 2 x DVI; HDM; DisplayPort; 2-year warranty
Price £160
