The artwork is instantly recognisable as Asus have used this ‘claw design' on many of their boxes over the last 18 months.
The bundle includes a Crossfire cable, video converter and software disc, with literature. We always grab the latest drivers direct from the AMD download site.
The cooler adopts the traditional red and black colour scheme that Asus frequently use. The cooler overhangs the PCB by a noticeable margin.
If you are paying attention you will see that the two fans are actually different. The fan on the right has 11 smaller blades, and the fan on the left has 9 thick blades. The idea is that the air will be forced across from the fan on the right while the fan on the left will enhance the flow across the components and out the rear of the case, while reducing air flow noise between the fans.
The Asus HD7850 Direct CU II V2 features two DVI connectors alongside a full sized HDMI and Displayport connector. This card has full Eyefinity support for multi monitor gaming.
The card takes power from only a single 6 pin power connector.
The HD7850 is Crossfire capable in a 2 way configuration. AMD only support 3 or 4 way Crossfire capabilities with more expensive cards in the range.
The Asus HD7850 cooler is a Direct contact design, with three heatpipes running into a rack of aluminum fins.
The Asus HD7850 is clocked at 860mhz, and the memory runs at 1,200mhz (4.8Gbps effective). The Pitcairn Core has 32 ROPS, 64 TMU's and 1,024 shaders. The 2 GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 256 bit memory interface.