AFOX HD7850 Single Slot Crossfire Review

1. Introduction2. AFOX HD7850 Single Slot3. AFOX HD7850 Single Slot (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 2011 (1080p)10. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p)11. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (1080p)12. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p)13. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p)14. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (1080p)15. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (1080p)16. Gaming: Dirt Showdown (5760x1080)17. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (5760x1080)18. Technical: Thermal Dynamics19. Technical: Acoustics Performance20. Technical: Power Consumption21. Technical: Overclocking22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

Today we take a first look at the new single slot HD7850 graphics card from AFOX. The company claim this is the ‘world's most powerful single slot graphics card' and our review will highlight Crossfire performance. If you are building a space restricted media center but don't want to compromise when gaming, are these the products you should be shortlisting?

AFOX as a brand name may be unknown to our readers, however they are a spin off from parent company Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Co) a Taiwanese multinational electronics manufacturing company based in Taipei. Foxconn manufacture a huge range of products, such as the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

There really is no question that their manufacturing capabilities are world class, so we have high hopes that the AFOX HD7850 Single Slot may be one of the best choices for a tiny media system. We already know that a single HD7850 can run out of horsepower at high resolution with some of the more demanding engines, but how about two?

Product	AMD HD7970	AMD HD7950	AMD HD7870	AFOX HD7850 Single Slot
Core Clock speed	925mhz	800mhz	1000mhz	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	118.4 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	29.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,375mhz	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	5.5 GBps	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	264 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

The card operates with a GPU clock speed of 860MHz, utilises 64 texture units and features 2GB of memory on a 256-bit interface which is clocked at 1200MHz (4.8 Gbps GDDR5).

Today we have not one, but two AFOX HD7850 Single slot cards. The ‘AFOX' artwork looks surprisingly like the Mozilla Firefox logo. Or is it just me?

The accessories are included in a thin separate box which rests on top of the card. The bundle includes a driver installation guide and disc and a power converter cable. We always recommend you grab the latest drivers from the official AMD site however as these could be several revisions out of date.

The AFOX HD7850 Single slot card is built around a plain black PCB. The AFOX logo is seen on a sticker, visible in the center of the small, offset fan. The company logo is also highlighted right above the PCIe slot connector. The AMD logo is printed top right at the front of the cooler.

The card is Crossfire capable in a 2 way configuration. If you want three or quad Crossfire options then you need to buy a 79xx product. The AFOX HD7850 demands power from a single 6 pin PCI connector.

The card has a full sized Displayport, a mini Displayport, full sized HDMI and DVI connector. It is Eyefinity capable. This is an impressive array of output connectors for a single slot card.

The single slot cooler is easy to remove and comprises two copper heatpipes which run across the length of the cooler to the copper base. The small fan is offset to the left.

Above, we can see just how thin these cards are, positioned next to a reference dual slot AMD graphics card.

An overview of the AFOX HD7850 graphics card, running in single and Crossfire configurations. The Pitcairn GPU is built on the 28nm manufacturing process and utilises 32 ROPS and 1024 unified shaders. The 2GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. These cards are clocked at 860mhz on the core and 1,200mhz memory (4.8Gbps effective).

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system this year which will make for an interesting market comparison.

Main Test System:

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: AFOX HD7850 Single Slot x2
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitor: Dell U3011. Dell 2410 x 3 for Eyefinity.

Comparison Cards:
KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC
Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition
Asus GTX680
Asus GTX670 Direct CU II TOP
HD7970 GHZ Edition
HD7970
MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III 3GD5/OC
HD7950
Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition
HD7870
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition
XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx
HD7770 CFx
HD7770
Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition
HD6790
HD6770
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Software:

Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:

Alien V Predator
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
F1 2011
Total War: Shogun 2
Battlefield 3
Dirt Showdown

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

A single card slots in between the overclocked Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X and the Nvidia GTX570. Adding another for Crossfire reaps huge reward, with the frame rate average improving to almost 97. This manages to outperform the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition at the slower bios setting, which is a great achievement.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

In Crossfire, the AFOX HD7850 graphics cards perform at the same level as the last generation GTX680 in this Direct X 10 benchmark, scoring around 33,000 points.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

In this Direct X 11 benchmark, the single AFOX HD7850 performs at a similar level to the GTX570, scoring 5,461 points. In Crossfire, the score increases to almost 10,000 points, outperforming the last generation dual GPU flagship, the HD6990.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	AFOX HD7850 Single Slot
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

At these settings, the game is perfectly playable with a single card. In Crossfire, the frame rate improves significantly, averaging 92. This is slightly better than the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition at the slower bios setting.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

Alien V Predator is a demanding Direct X 11 game and in a single card configuration, the AFOX HD7850 manages to match the GTX570. In Crossfire the AFOX HD7850 cards almost catch the overclocked KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC, averaging 104 frames per second.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

The single HD7850 manages to outperform the last generation HD6970, and in Crossfire the performance level is almost identical to the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition with the lethal boost enabled.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

Crossfire results are great, averaging 176 frames per second at these settings.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

The AFOX HD7850 Single Slot cards handle this engine without any problems. In Crossfire the two cards deliver an average of 122 frames per second, which is impressive.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

Crossfire scaling is good in Shogun 2, averaging 86 frames per second at 1080p. This is 3 frames per second faster than the HD7970 GHZ Edition.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

Battlefield is a fantastic looking game and it runs well on the AFOX HD7850. When using two cards the frame rate performance improves, close to an average of 100 fps.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

Performance in Crossfire is excellent, averaging 83 frames per second. Slightly faster than the HD7970 GHZ Edition.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

We configured the game to run on three 24 inch monitors at 5760×1080. We also dropped the Texture quality from ultra to high.

Good results for the Crossfire X system, averaging 79 frames per second at these settings. Not as fast as the HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition, but still impressive results.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The single slot cooler isn't as good as the reference cooler, although due to the physical size differences this really is to be expected. It runs between 7 and 8c hotter than our reference card.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The tiny fan on the AFOX HD7850 Single Slot cooler has to spin very high to maintain the thermal curve. As such the AFOX card is louder than the reference board under load. It is noticeably loud, especially when tasked with the synthetic Furmark suite.

The fan spins around 70 percent when gaming and this rises to 81 percent in Furmark.

When idle this drops to 20 percent which is basically inaudible.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.

Over the months, AMD's partners have fine tuned the power consumption from the reference board, and we can see that the AFOX single slot HD7850 demands a little less power under load. Not really that big a deal in the real world, but noticeable with our test equipment.

For our overclocking tests today we are using AMD's Catalyst Control Center.

Our overclocking results are a little worse than we have experienced with the standard size HD7850, but again this is to be expected considering the reduced form factor. That said, a final overclock result of almost 9 percent on the core, and 10 percent on the memory is not bad.

The overclocked settings, help generate another 400 points, with a final score of 5880. At this speed the card pushes past the HD6970, and closer to the GTX580 flagship from the last generation.

The AFOX HD7850 Single slot graphics cards are a specialist design, ideally suited to the audience who want to build a gaming capable system into a space restricted chassis. They are also a great shortlist option for an enthusiast who is currently building a diminutive media center with gaming frame rate prowess.

In regards to performance, AMD's HD7850 is a decent card that can handle most games at 1080p, although it can struggle a little with some of the more recent, intensive Direct X 11 engines. As our testing has showcased, adding two into a Crossfire configuration delivers tangible, real world benefits.

Quite often, two of these cards in Crossfire were able to compete with the highly overclocked KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC Edition, which is a remarkable achievement (1,268mhz boost speed). This specific KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC is priced around £550 inc vat (don't confuse it with the slower version). Each of these AFOX HD7850 Single Slot cards costs £207, so you would be saving around £135.

Downsides to the dual card AFOX solution? Well, the KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC Edition is much quieter and doesn't need to rely on a Crossfire or SLI driver profile to achieve maximum performance.

There are always compromises to accept when incorporating a single slot graphics card. Due to the physical dimensions of the solution, the cooler is much smaller, and the fan has to spin much faster to compensate for rising temperatures.

When compared against the reference cooler, the AFOX HD7850 Single slot is both louder, and hotter running. There really is no way around this, even with optimisations of the overall power demand.

While no one will really be contemplating a permanent overclock via one of these cards, there is clearly some headroom available. We were able to achieve around a 9-10% increase on both core and memory speeds, a decent result for a single slot cooler.

You will already know if you want one of these cards. For a specific system build they will prove invaluable due to the space saving benefits. That said, if you are building a standard enthusiast gaming rig, then there are quieter and cooler running HD7850 options available.

You can buy these cards from Airetechit for £207 inc vat each.

Pros:

• Single Slot.
• Nice design.
• In Crossfire they can compete with ultra high end £500+ video cards.
• Ideal for high powered media center.
• buy one now and another later, when funds permit.

Cons:

• Can get loud.
• run hotter than reference HD7850.
• rely on Crossfire profiles for maximum performance.

Kitguru says: These are good cards, ideally suited to a specific audience who need a powerful, single slot graphics card.

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