Sapphire Radeon HD6850 and HD6870 Review

Overclocking the Sapphire HD6850 in Catalyst Control Center is a futile process as it limits the card to 850MHz, however Sapphire sent over a beta of their new Trixx overclocking tool for the HD6800 series.

We need to point out that the version of TriXX shown in these screenshots might look (and act) slightly differently to the final version bundled with the retail product.

We would like to add that the results on this page will not relate to the final product as the Sapphire card we received had 1120 shader cores (see image below), this page is therefore here mainly out of curiousity.

The Sapphire Trixx utility will be bundled with retail versions of the Sapphire HD6850 and it allows the end user to change a plethora of settings, including GPU voltage changes. We managed to get the core to 860mhz without adjusting the voltage.

After cranking the voltage (as we always do!) we managed to get the core stable to 951MHz and the memory to 1132MHz. This is an incredible core increase from 775MHz and although we could just be lucky with this particular sample, it could very well show massive potential headroom with the HD6850 hardware – we experienced similar results with the 960 core XFX HD6850.

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