Shootouts

AMD Radeon HD 6850 Shootout - Mainstream Slugfest

By Kenny Yeo - 14 Dec 2010

Test Setup

Test Setup

To find out which is the best Radeon HD 6850, we’ll be using our X58 setup with the following specifications:

  • Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
  • Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
  • 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows 7 Ultimate

Clock speeds are usually a good indication of how a card will perform, and like some of the cards we've amassed in this article, we are expecting the reference clocked Gigabyte, MSI and Sapphire card to perform similarly and also provide a baseline reference. The ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU with its mildly overclocked core should be a tad faster, but it will be no match for the PowerColor, Sapphire (Toxic Edition) and XFX cards which have been considerable bumps to their clock speeds.

Here's a table detailing the cards' clock speeds.

Cards Core Clock Speed Memory Clock Speed
ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU 790MHz 4000MHz DDR
Gigabyte HD 6850 775MHz 4000MHz DDR
MSI R6850 775MHz 4000MHz DDR
PowerColor PCS+ HD 6850 820MHz 4400MHz DDR
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 775MHz 4000MHz DDR
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Edition 820MHz 4400MHz DDR
XFX Radeon HD 6850 Black Edition 820MHz 4400MHz DDR

The full list of cards tested and driver versions used as below:

  • ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU (Catalyst 10.10)
  • Gigabyte HD 6850 (Catalyst 10.10)
  • MSI R6850-PM2DIGD5 (Catalyst 10.10)
  • PowerColor PCS+ HD 6850 (Catalyst 10.10)
  • Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 (Catalyst 10.10)
  • Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Edition (Catalyst 10.10)
  • XFX Radeon HD 6850 Black Edition (Catalyst 10.10)
  • AMD Radeon HD 6870 (Catalyst 10.10)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 (ForceWare 258.96)

The list of benchmark used are as follows:

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  • Crysis Warhead
  • Far Cry 2
  • Warhammer: Dawn of War 2
  • Battlefield Bad Company 2
  • “Heaven" from Unigine v2.1
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
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