Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card Review

AMD’s 6800 Series cards are finally here!  If you have been following the news over the past couple of weeks you know that today AMD will be launching the HD 6870 and HD 6850 graphics cards.  These new cards are in no way a replacement for AMD’s 5800 Series of cards, but more or less a refresh.  They are still built on 40nm, but it seems AMD has focused more on efficiency and some other refinements.  With this refresh AMD hope to put themselves back in the graphics lead if they are not there already.  Today we will be looking at the HD 6850 from our friends at Sapphire.  This card features a clock speed of 775MHz for the core and 1000MHz for the memory.  Let’s check it out!

From what we gather from AMD this new series of products is named after islands in the Caribbean.  The 6850’s GPU is code-named Barts, which is short for Saint Barthelemy Island.  AMD has quite a lot coming in the next couple of months.  The high-end card you all have been waiting for will be released by the end of next month as the Radeon HD 6900 series.  Although today we will be just focusing on the HD 6800 series, more specifically the HD 6850.

Features
3D StereoScopic Support – Watch 3D video through the HDMI (ver 1.4) output or play 3D games through the DP (ver 1.2) output
Digital Power Management – Offers 10% better power management over tradition analog designs, delivers high performance features when needed and conserving power when GPU demand is low
AMD Eyefinity Multi-Display – Now with Display Port version 1.2! Daisy chain up to three DP 1.2 monitors per port and get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovation ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities.
Microsoft DirectX 11 – Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance with 2nd generation Microsoft DirectX 11 support.
Advanced Memory – Experience the speed, responsiveness, and performance of ultra-high bandwidth memory architecture.
AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing Technology – Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with AMD APP technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed.
ATI CrossFireX – Upgrade your 3D performance quickly and easily thanks to plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support.
HDMI 1.4 and Audio support – Port games or video to your bigscreen with HDMI! Supports both Audio/Video and stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats.

Packaging
The HD 6850 comes in a nice retail package with a list of some of the features on the front as well as a female character.  Of course no ATI marking as the ATI name is gone and it’s all AMD now.  On the back of the card there are some product highlights as well as some awards.  You can see a ThinkComputers award on there!

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card

Opening the box up we can see that everything is nicely packed inside.  Getting it all out we have the HD 6850, HDMI 1.4a extension cable, DVI to VGA adapter, 6pin PCI-E power adapter, CrossFire cable and the installation guide.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card

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