Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Review

By bgiacoletti

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Introduction

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Today we are going to be taking a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card. This is the factory overclocked version of the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 video card. This particular card does not contain Sapphire’s Vapor X cooler and is based on the reference PCB that is familiar to the 6800 series of AMD’s Radeon HD cards. Much like several other cards that are in this same class the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card is a 3D capable card that features the AMD HD3D technology. Now, don’t get disappointed; it has other AMD technologies too. Eyefinity is in there; it is crossfire capable should you wish to run more than one card for a little extra performance boost. I do have to let you know that just like the rest of the 6800 series you will only be able to hook up one other card in a crossfire configuration, so triple and quad crossfire setups are, unfortunately, not possible with this card.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card

The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card is a PCI-E 2.1 compliant card that is capable of full HD 1080p resolution. It has 1 GB of GDDR5 memory on-board and is Direct X 11 compatible so that all of your games, videos and movies are crystal clear and stutter free. As I mentioned earlier, the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card is factory overclocked to 820MHz on the GPU core and the memory is overclocked to 4400MHz, but I have a feeling we will be able to take this card a bit higher than that.

Sapphire currently makes 2 different versions of the Radeon HD 6850:

  • SAPPHIRE HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 PCIE
    775Mhz Core Clock/4000Mhz Memory Clock at $154.99 after rebate
  • SAPPHIRE TOXIC HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 PCIE
    820Mhz Core Clock/4400Mhz Memory Clock at $184.99

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card

One of the first things that came to mind when I opened the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card was that due to its reference design for the PCB and the cooling that this card might not be able to reach very high overclocks due to heat issues. In the past I have noticed that the reference style coolers are not that effective at moving the heat away from the vicinity of the card and therefore causes the cards to heat up a bit more than, say, a Vapor X cooler or an IceQ cooler. Another thing that struck my eye was the size of the card; now, although I have an NZXT Phantom case which is like the black hole of cases as it can accommodate just about any size video card with ease, some other cases might not be able to comfortably handle its 10″ length. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card is priced pretty much the same as the other cards at its price point at $184.99 with a full two year warranty.

Sapphire is currently one of the top video card makers in the world. They are based in Hong Kong China and are a maker of ATI/AMD based video cards and have recently added some new products to their roster such as motherboards, power supplies, multimedia products, and even their own lines of workstations and Mini PC’s. On top of that they make one of the more popular overclocking utilities that is called TRIXX. We used TRIXX, as a matter of fact, for all of the overclocking attempts done on this card.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Features:

  • Advanced GDDR5 Memory Technology
  • AMD Eyefinity Technology
  • ATI Avivo HD (DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray Playback)
  • ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology
  • PCI-Express 2.0
  • AMD HD3D Technology
  • Dual-Link DVI
  • HDMI 1.4a
  • Mini-DisplayPort
  • Single-Link DVI-D
  • DisplayPort 1.2
  • Microsoft DirectX 11
  • OpenGL 3.1 and 3.2
  • ATI Catalyst Control Center
  • Dolby TrueHD and DTSHD Master Audio Support
  • ATI PowerPlay
  • 3rd Generation TeraScale Engine
  • AMD Advanced Parallel Processing technology
  • Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3)
  • Windows 7 support

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Specifications

    Output:

  • 1 x Dual-Link DVI
  • 1 x HDMI 1.4a
  • 2 x Mini-DisplayPort
  • 1 x Single-Link DVI-D
  • DisplayPort 1.2

    • GPU:

  • 820 MHz Core Clock
  • 40 nm Chip
  • 960 x Stream Processors

    • Memory:

  • 1024 MB Size
  • 256 -bit GDDR5
  • 4400 MHz Effective

    • Software:

  • Driver CD
  • SAPPHIRE TriXX Utility

    • Accessory:

  • CrossFire Bridge Interconnect Cable
  • DVI to VGA Adapter
  • Mini-DP to DP Cable
  • 6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable
  • HDMI 1.4a high speed 1.8 meter cable(Full Retail SKU only)

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