Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition Review

The Pitcairn cards are without question the best buy in the new 7 series of AMD hardware. The HD7950 and HD7970 are assuredly the performance leaders, but the £360+ asking price is prohibitive for most people.

If we look at the Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition which we reviewed today, it offers comparable performance to the last generation HD6970, at a fraction of the cost. In regards to maximum ‘bang for the buck', the HD7850 is hard to beat right now.

The Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition builds upon the excellent reference card performance, while lowering noise levels significantly and increasing both core and memory speeds for additional frame rates. The two fan cooler is both quiet and attractive, fully utilising the thick copper heatpipes to transfer heat from the core as quickly as possible.

There is a huge amount of headroom on the HD7850 core and we maximised the sliders in Catalyst Control Center without experiencing instability to 1050mhz core /1450mhz memory. We would imagine that 1100mhz+ is possible thanks to the excellent Sapphire cooler but we need an updated TriXX tool to fully support this hardware.

When overclocked to 1050mhz, the HD7850 is only a little behind the GTX580 which is incredible considering the price difference. The PitCairn cards really do come into their own when pushed past the 1GHZ mark thanks to the excellent shader performance and 256 bit memory interface.

The Sapphire HD7850 card is the finest card we have tested in this range and would be ideal for a high performance media center, due to the very low noise levels. We would imagine there will be a small price premium when this card is available, but we would assume that Sapphire will want to hit the £200 inc vat price point.

Pros:

• Almost silent.
• Great performance.
• plenty of overclocking headroom.
• runs cool.

Cons:

• Nothing.

Kitguru says: A fantastic, high value for money gaming card which produces very little noise and heat.

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