XFX Radeon HD 6850 Review
Written by
Clive Webster
November 6, 2010 | 10:18
Tags: #comparison #consumption #directx-11 #dx11 #faster #fastest #fps #hd-6850 #overclock #overclocking #performance #power #radeon #speed #temperature #thermals
Companies: #xfx
1 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Review2 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Test Setup3 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Dirt 2 Performance4 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Arma II: Operation Arrowhead Performance5 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Just Cause 2 Performance6 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Bad Company 2 Performance7 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Power Consumption and Thermals
XFX Radeon HD 6850 1GB Review
ManufacturerXFX
UK price (as reviewed)£149.98 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed)$189.99 (ex tax)
We’ve not seen many Radeon HD 6850 1GB cards use the reference cooler, probably because it was loud and didn’t cool very well. We’re therefore going to take a look at XFX’s attempt to keep close to ATI’s £150 pricing while delivering the quietness that we’ve become so used to from the Radeon HD 5000-series.
Click to enlarge
The most obvious difference between the XFX and the reference card is that the end-mounted radial fan has been dropped in favour of a more conventional fan that’s mounted in the centre of the cooler. This 92mm fan blows down onto an aluminium heatsink, with air also travelling through onto the PCB and the memory chips.
As this the first XFX HD 6800-series card, the cooler is the only difference from the reference card, so the performance of the card is identical to that of the reference card we tested for our ATI Radeon HD 6850 review. The change in cooler hasn’t lead to a price increase though – the XFX is as keenly priced as it needs to be to fight against the GeForce GTX 460 1GB on an equal footing.
Performance and Overclocking
As a stock-speed HD 6850 1GB, the XFX trades places with the GTX 460 1GB across our test games – in some the XFX is slightly stronger and in others the GTX 460 1GB comes out on top.
There’s little to call between the two cards overall as far as performance goes though, unless you only care about a certain game or setting (AA in Bad Company 2, for example).
Who’s card is this?
However, there was a clear difference between the cards when it came to the noise – while the reference cooler of the GTX 460 1GB was very quiet, the XFX was audible even over the hum of the air-con in the labs and did a fair impression of a hairdryer when we asked it to do any work. At least the cooler knocked 10oC from the load GPU temperature, even if the card did consume 11W more power while doing so.
At the moment the only tool we can find that will overclock a HD 6850 1GB is the Overdrive portion of Catalyst – RivaTuner, ATI Clock Tool and GPU Tool don’t work, while MSI’s Aterburner only offered the same limits as Overdrive. The XFX hit these maximums easily, meaning that we could boost the GPU from 775MHz to 850MHz, while we could boost the memory from 1GHz to 1.
2GHz (4.8GHz effective). We’d love to see how far the card could go with a less limiting tool.
Regardless, this overclock yielded a decent increase in performance: at 1,920 x 1,200 the minimum frame rate rose from 25fps to 29fps with no AA applied and from 21fps to 23fps with 4x AA applied.
Conclusion
While the lower temperature of the XFX’s GPU and the £150 price (despite using a custom cooler) are good to see, the loud fan didn’t win much praise. As a stock-speed HD 6850 1GB, the performance of the XFX was on a par with that of a GTX 460 1GB, but the reference cooler of the GeForce card is much quieter. We’ll have another HD 6850 1GB partner online soon, but we’d rather have a standard GTX 460 1GB than this noisy XFX card.
- Performance
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- x
- x
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- 7/10
- Features
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- x
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- 8/10
- Value
- x
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- 8/10
- Overall
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- 8/10
Score Guide
Specifications
- Graphics Processor ATI Radeon HD 6850
- Pipeline 1,120 stream processors (775MHz), 32 ROPs
- Memory 1GB GDDR5, 4GHz effective
- Bandwidth 128GB/sec, 256-bit interface
- Compatability DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.
1 - Outputs/Inputs Single-link DVI, dual-link DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI
- Size 235mm long, dual-slot
- Power Connectors 1 x 6-pin PCI-E, end-mounted
- Warranty Five years
1 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Review2 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Test Setup3 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Dirt 2 Performance4 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Arma II: Operation Arrowhead Performance5 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Just Cause 2 Performance6 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Bad Company 2 Performance7 — XFX Radeon HD 6850 Power Consumption and Thermals
Radeon HD 6850 [in 2 benchmarks]
Radeon HD 6850
Buy
- Interface PCIe 2.0 x16
- Core clock speed 0
- Max video memory 1024 MB
- Memory type GDDR5
- Memory clock speed 0
- Maximum resolution
Summary
AMD started Radeon HD 6850 sales 21 October 2010 at a recommended price of $179.
This is a TeraScale 2 architecture desktop card based on 40 nm manufacturing process and primarily aimed at gamers. 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at are supplied, and together with 256 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 128.0 GB/s.
Compatibility-wise, this is dual-slot card attached via PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Its manufacturer default version has a length of 198 mm. 1x 6-pin power connector is required, and power consumption is at 127 Watt.
It provides poor gaming and benchmark performance at
5.02%
of a leader’s which is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.
GeForce RTX
4090
Compare
General info
Some basic facts about Radeon HD 6850: architecture, market segment, release date etc.
| Place in performance rating | 519 | |
| Value for money | 0. 64 |
|
| Architecture | TeraScale 2 (2009−2015) | |
| GPU code name | Barts | |
| Market segment | Desktop | |
| Design | reference | |
| Release date | 21 October 2010 (12 years old) |
|
| Launch price (MSRP) | $179 | |
| Current price | $219 (1.2x MSRP) | of 49999 (A100 SXM4) |
Value for money
To calculate the index we compare the characteristics of graphics cards against their prices.
- 0
- 50
- 100
Technical specs
Radeon HD 6850’s general performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU base clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed.
These parameters indirectly speak of Radeon HD 6850’s performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.
| Pipelines / CUDA cores | 960 | of 20480 (Data Center GPU Max NEXT) |
| Number of transistors | 1,700 million | of 14400 (GeForce GTX 1080 SLI Mobile) |
| Manufacturing process technology | 40 nm | of 4 (GeForce RTX 4080 Ti) |
| Thermal design power (TDP) | 127 Watt | of 2400 (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem) |
| Texture fill rate | 37.20 | of 969.9 (h200 SXM5 96 GB) |
| Floating-point performance | 1,488.0 gflops | of 16384 (Radeon Pro Duo) |
Compatibility, dimensions and requirements
Information on Radeon HD 6850’s compatibility with other computer components.
Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it’s interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).
| Bus support | AGP | |
| Interface | PCIe 2.0 x16 | |
| Length | 198 mm | |
| Width | 2-slot | |
| Supplementary power connectors | 1x 6-pin |
Memory
Parameters of memory installed on Radeon HD 6850: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Note that GPUs integrated into processors have no dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM instead.
| Memory type | GDDR5 | |
| Maximum RAM amount | 1 GB | of 128 (Radeon Instinct MI250X) |
| Memory bus width | 256 Bit | of 8192 (Radeon Instinct MI250X) |
| Memory bandwidth | 128. 0 GB/s |
of 14400 (Radeon R7 M260) |
Video outputs and ports
Types and number of video connectors present on Radeon HD 6850. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference graphics cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model, while non-reference desktop models can (though not necessarily will) bear a different set of video ports.
| Display Connectors | 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort | |
| Eyefinity | 1 | |
| HDMI | + | |
| DisplayPort support | — |
Technologies
Technological solutions and APIs supported by Radeon HD 6850. You’ll probably need this information if you need some particular technology for your purposes.
| AppAcceleration | — | |
| CrossFire | 1 | |
| Enduro | — | |
| HD3D | — | |
| PowerTune | — | |
| TrueAudio | — | |
| ZeroCore | — |
API support
APIs supported by Radeon HD 6850, sometimes including their particular versions.
| DirectX | DirectX® 11 | |
| Shader Model | 5.0 | |
| OpenGL | 4.4 | of 4.6 (GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile) |
| OpenCL | 1.2 | |
| Mantle | — |
Benchmark performance
Non-gaming benchmark performance of Radeon HD 6850. Note that overall benchmark performance is measured in points in 0-100 range.
Overall score
This is our combined benchmark performance rating. We are regularly improving our combining algorithms, but if you find some perceived inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.
HD 6850
5.02
- Passmark
- 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics
Passmark
This is probably the most ubiquitous benchmark, part of Passmark PerformanceTest suite.
It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various load, providing four separate benchmarks for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 (the last being done in 4K resolution if possible), and few more tests engaging DirectCompute capabilities.
Benchmark coverage: 25%
HD 6850
1978
3DMark Fire Strike Graphics
Fire Strike is a DirectX 11 benchmark for gaming PCs. It features two separate tests displaying a fight between a humanoid and a fiery creature seemingly made of lava. Using 1920×1080 resolution, Fire Strike shows off some realistic enough graphics and is quite taxing on hardware.
Benchmark coverage: 13%
HD 6850
2460
Mining hashrates
Cryptocurrency mining performance of Radeon HD 6850. Usually measured in megahashes per second.
| Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256) | 139 Mh/s |
Is Radeon HD 6850 good for gaming?
Let’s see how good Radeon HD 6850 is for gaming.
Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in frames per second. Comparisons with game system requirements are included, but remember that sometimes official requirements may reflect reality inaccurately.
Relative perfomance
Overall Radeon HD 6850 performance compared to nearest competitors among desktop video cards.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 SE
101.59
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE
101.39
ATI Radeon HD 5850
100.6
AMD Radeon HD 6850
100
AMD Radeon 550
99
AMD Radeon RX 570X
97.21
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 v2
96.02
Radeon HD 6850 NVIDIA equivalent
The nearest Radeon HD 6850’s NVIDIA equivalent is GeForce GTX 460 SE, which is faster by 1% and higher by 4 positions in our performance rating.
GeForce GTX
460 SE
Compare
Here are some closest NVIDIA rivals to Radeon HD 6850:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
114.54
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 SE
101.59
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE
101.39
AMD Radeon HD 6850
100
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 v2
96.02
NVIDIA GeForce 945A
93.63
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
88.84
Similar GPUs
Here is our recommendation of several graphics cards that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.
GeForce GTX
460 SE
Compare
GeForce GTX
560 SE
Compare
GeForce GTX
460 v2
Compare
Radeon HD
6930
Compare
GeForce GTX
650
Compare
Radeon HD
5830
Compare
Recommended processors
These processors are most commonly used with Radeon HD 6850 according to our statistics.
Core i5
2400
3.2%
Core i5
3330
2.6%
Phenom II
X4 955 (95W)
2.5%
Core i5
3470
2.3%
Core i3
2100
2%
Xeon
E5450
1.8%
Phenom II
X6 1055T (95W)
1.6%
Core i3
2120
1.