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The EAH6850 Direct CU is a fantastic card with typical high standards of Asus build quality. One of the biggest selling points this card has is the combination of cooling performance and high overclocking capabilities. Sure, its not going to overclock any better than the XFX HD6850 Black Edition or the Sapphire HD6850 Toxic Edition, but it is still a very tempting proposition.
The Direct CU cooler is very impressive, holding the card around the 65c threshold when gaming, without generating a lot of noise. While there is no free game, the bundle is decent, and we like the inclusion of the leather wallet, which can hold a small collection of compact discs, or DVD's.
While the card has not proved to be better than either the XFX Black Edition or the Sapphire Toxic, the asking price is extremely competitive – available in the UK for only £159.99 inc vat.
Overclocking headroom is fantastic, but we fail to understand why Asus didn't set the default clocks a little higher – even 850mhz on the core and 1100mhz via the GDDR5 memory would be a safe bet, taking into consideration that some cards might not overclock as well as others. This would have ensured GTX460 beating levels of performance, out of the box, without having to manually overclock the card further.
KitGuru says: All in all this is a great board, and at this price point is a no brainer.
I have owned several asus cards and they always have served me well. this looks a solid purchase with a fine price. cant beat £159.99 ! (well you could, £99.99 – talk to them zardon :p).
Very nice indeed. good performance all round. Quick question however, why 3 screen testing, who the hell can afford 3 monitors?
Rather boring looking board, but it performs well. temps are excellent. 65c under load is more like what I want to see.
Been waiting for a good review of this for a while, saw it on OCUk last week, didnt know if it was any good. I agree about the low overclocks. surely its not hard to crank the bios clocks a bit, its basically running at stock and can hit 1000mhz on the core !
Excellent, been waiting for this for a while. I never buy Sapphire or XFX, only Asus. I wait 🙂
Excellent all round card, doesn’t seem that quiet though which is a bit disappointing
Leather case is a weird addition for a gfx?
Poor clock choice for such a card, far too low
price of the 6850 is good, crossfire they are killer, but bot sure it’s worth it as a really fast single card doesn’t need a profile