AMD Radeon HD 6850 Shootout - Mainstream Slugfest
Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
While clock speeds are usually a good indicator of a card's performance, there was no way of telling how effective a card's cooler is until we put it to the test. Although Gigabyte's dual-fan Windforce 2x cooler recorded the lowest operating temperature, XFX's custom cooler is arguably more effective if you consider that the card is factory overclocked in the first place. PowerColor's PCS+ cooling systems have been a bit disappointing of late and their PCS+ HD 6850 continued this trend as the card recorded the highest running temperature of 71 degrees Celsius.
Power Consumption
Nothing unusual to report here as all seven cards recorded very comparable power draw readings. If anything, we noticed that the factory overclocked cards had a marginally higher power draw reading at load, which is to be expected.
Overclocking
Our attempts in overclocking the cards yielded mostly comparable results with most of the cards topping out at around the 900 - 920MHz mark at the core. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Edition, however, deserves special praise as it managed an unbelievable 1010MHz at the core and 4800MHz DDR at the memory. At the other end of the spectrum, the Gigabye HD 6850, despite its effective Windforce 2x cooler, only managed 870MHz at the core and 4800MHz DDR at the memory. There's always an element of luck involved when it comes to overclocking and our guess is that the Gigabyte card just lucked out at this test.