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Sapphire Radeon HD6850 and HD6870 Review

When overclocking the Sapphire HD6870 we used Catalyst Control Centre.

Overclocking on reference boards indicates potential speeds a few weeks down the line when AMD partners release their own overclocked solutions with improved coolers and bios configurations.

Our overclocking tests were reasonably successful considering this is a reference cooler, although we didn't find huge overhead on the core. We were limited to 950MHz on the core and 1,140MHz on the memory.

We then wanted to run some tests with our overclocked results, settling on 940MHz core and 1,140MHz memory for the final CrossFireX settings.

The overclock results are healthy, Unigine Heaven Benchmark shows a 2fps increase in and 3DMark Vantage scales with 300 additional points when overclocked.

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17 comments

  1. Your 6850 have 1120 sharders. o_o”

    No votes yet.
  2. these are really good cards, love the performance and price.

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  3. Excellent boards those, really look the part and performance is awesome. overclocking is great !

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  4. Shit… haha 6850 is a killer card and guess what? its right in the price range im looking at 😀
    Only thing i can say reading other reviews is that the 6850 reference cooler is pretty weak. These sapphire cards look great for the money 😀 (6850) will reserve judgement til i seem overclocked 6870s

    No votes yet.
  5. Killer card indeed, couldnt agree more.

    No votes yet.
  6. HD6870 is good, but I dont like reference designs, too noisy/hot/ I will wait for sapphires or XFXs custom cooling one.

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  7. HD6870 is the one I would get, but not reference version. will wait a month for vapor X or toxic version.

    No votes yet.
  8. 6870 reference design is a waste, waiting on other solutions

    No votes yet.
  9. the hd6870 isn’t my first choice until they get third party products out of the stable,

    Its always the way with launches, but its weird AMD have let their partners make third party solutions for 6850s

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  10. over clocked HD6870s might be hard to get out the door with such poor over clocks on the core. seems both boards max out around 950

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  11. While these cards aren’t awe inspiring, when you look at the price 150 for a 6850. about the same as the 5770. 25% more performance, looks good.

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  12. those overclocks on the 50 are great. id say overclocked versions will be out really soon. vapor x anyone ?

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  13. As JC stated, this 6850 has 1120 shaders instead of the default 960…

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  14. The bottom gpuz screenshot is for the 6870

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  15. I get the same 3dmark vantage score as this HD6850. I was hoping I might even up with a 1120 shader version but sadly not 🙁

    No votes yet.
  16. @ Jon

    I saw in another review that they managed to get the Sapphire 6870’s core clock to 1000mHz stable. I’m sure if put under water, these cards will have a bit more overclocking headroom anyway.

    No votes yet.
  17. asdaSd

    No votes yet.