AMD Radeon HD 6850 Overclocking Roundup: Asus, XFX, & MSI
by Ryan Smith on November 8, 2010 12:40 AM ESTPushing the Overclocking Limits: MSI Afterburner
For the Radeon HD 6850, AMD is giving the series a fairly low Overdrive limit of only 850MHz for the core. In practice we’ve found that this is attainable without voltage modification on all of our cards, so for more extreme overclocking we have to work a bit harder. Most tools simply tie in to Overdirve, and as a result will stick with the same 850MHz limit. Asus’s SmartDoctor can go up to 1000Mhz out of the box, while for the MSI R6850 and other cards MSI’s Afterburner can surpass this, but it won’t do so out of the box.
In order to push a 6850 beyond the Overdrive limits, Afterburner must be told to ignore them. This is accomplished by opening up the MSIAfterburner.cfg file in the program’s directory, and changing the entry EnableUnofficialOverclocking from 0 to 1. With this change in place Afterburner can go over 1000MHz, which is beyond what any of our cards can achieve without exotic cooling methods.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
93 Comments
View All Comments
doylecc - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I, too, was unhappy with the inclusion of an OCed Nvidia card in an AMD launch article--it was inserting a "ringer" with an unfair advantage.However, in an OC article, anything goes! This is the place you should have included OCed Nvidia cards for comparison.
The general principle should be:
--Stock cards only in launch articles (since launching cards often have no OCed variants available)
--OCed card reviews can be open to all since the very nature of the cards being reviewed is "non-standard".
We just want to compare apples to apples.
Thanks for a good review.
Masterofevil22 - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Just received my new XFX 6850 with Dual Fans!! First thing I did was to install the newest drivers 11.2 and MSI Afterburner to OC this new supposedly mod friendly hardware. First attempt with stock vcore is %100 stable at 925Mhz GPU and 1150Mhz on the RAM. I can actually get the RAM to 1200Mhz stable, but the GPU has only got a small amount of headroom left at the stock voltage and I CANNOT UNLOCK THE VOLTAGE REGULATOR IN AFTERBURNER!!Any ideas on how to remedy this would be appreciated!!?!!?!!?
Phylyp - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Ryan: Thank you for this review - A week ago, I was going to pick an XFX 6850 based on prior experience with XFX & its brand reputation. Your article highlighted that the Asus 6850 was better aligned to my needs (low noise as my first priority, temperatures as my second, performance as my third).Funnily enough, my card came with two 6-pin connectors, though it shares the same specs as you've listed. It wasn't a problem for me because I had adequate connectors on my PSU for this. I had done adequate research, but Asus's lack of detailed technical info on their website meant that I didn't know of this until I received the card.