AMD Radeon HD 6850 Overclocking Roundup: Asus, XFX, & MSI
by Ryan Smith on November 8, 2010 12:40 AM ESTThe Test & Stock Gaming Performance
For our testing we’re using the 6800 series launch drivers: AMD Catalyst 10.10.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 XFX Radeon HD 6850 MSI R6850 OC Asus EAH6850 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 260.89 AMD Catalyst 10.10 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
As we do have a couple of overclocked cards in today’s roundup we’ve gone ahead and quickly run a subset of our benchmarks. There won’t be any surprises here, as the MSI card is the only card with a significant overclock, pushing it ahead of the reference card, the XFX, and the Asus 6850s but not being enough to significantly chance the performance of the card.
The Asus with its sub-2% overclock doesn’t make any notable headway here. Meanwhile the MSI R6850 OC with its higher overclock does manage to top the Radeon HD 5850 at times, depending on how big the gap was in the first place. Whereas the stock 6850 is undeniably slower than the stock 5850, we’d be comfortable calling the R6850 OC comparable to the 5850.
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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.