Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1 GB GDDR5 VGA/DL-DVI-I/SL-DVI-D/HDMI/Display Port PCI-Express Video Card 100315L

Not much to say that people don’t already know, about how it’s silent (can’t hear it over my case fans at idle, and can barely hear it over my case fans at load), overclocks well (950+/1200+ for my card), is cool (37C idle, 67C load, and that’s with overclocking!), and powerful (roughly copy to a GTX460-1GB). I use 3-watch Eyefinity all the time for productivity, and it’s a huge bonus to not have to use multiple cards to achieve that.

One thing that people might not know though is that this card is basically copy to the ASUS DirectCu. They are nearly the same in terms of noise and GPU core temperatures, even with the direct-Cu thing which is apparently overblown. Look at reviewers who measure these things, and the ASUS and Sapphire cards will come up surrounded by 2 degrees C of each other and 2 decibels as well.

Why is this?

Well, if you look at online reviews where they remove the shrouds covering the cards, you can see that the heat sink and fan are basically the same between them. They both have the same size copper heat pipes and huge aluminum heatsinks.

Yes, the ASUS one has the copper heat pipes physically touching the GPU core (hence the name DirectCu, since “Cu” stands for “copper”), but that doesn’t lower the temperature by that much more compared to the Sapphire, which uses a traditional (aluminum? nickel?) plate that touches the GPU and then transfers the heat to the copper heatpipes.

The only other difference is that ASUS’s shroud is smaller, whereas Sapphire’s shroud is huge and helps direct the flow of air OUTSIDE of the case rather than twirl the hot air back into your case.

That last wits is why I chose the Sapphire card: it’s basically the same as the ASUS card except that it directs the hot air out of the case better. And it was $7 cheaper than the ASUS at the time I bought it, which was a nice bonus.

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Currently the best bang for the buck when it comes to gaming. Runs cool and the ability to help up to 3 monitors with a single card is incredible. Also, unlike the GTX 460, only requires one 6-pin power. Not too noisy either. Can run some modern games on ultra at 55-60fps. Certainly recommend to anyone looking to buy on soon.

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Jeremiah E. Johnson (indianapolis IN) –

  

i picked this card based off reviews and the price range when i bought it it was 199.00 as far as performance is concerned it is inbetween a gtx 460 and Gtx 470. works fantastic runs most of my games i have tried so far with out any issues i want to get a second one for crossfire this is a 2 slot card and the only other thing i should mention is make sure that you have an hdmi cable if you be going to to hook this up to your tv it works fantastic it was driving a 46inch sony 120hz 1080p tv fine. based on the results i have gotten its ruffly 2 to 3 times quicker than a ps3 plus you have the ati stream converter for your video formats. i thought i would mention save your self the 50 bucks and just oc this and it will match the 6870 base performance. there are no current drivers for this but amd says it will be fully supported in the 10.12 update the other thing with this card is it sipps power seriously at idle its only drawing 0.95 volts and tops out at about 128watts they suggjest a 500w powersupply for this card as well.

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