With HD 6800 series, AMD introduced bang-per-buck competition to its own HD 5800 series. Sapphire’s HD 6850 Toxic Edition will of course be a bit more expensive than the reference card, but the build quality, finishing touches, silence and improved performance have always been great reasons for purchasing Toxic Edition cards. You can find this card priced at around €190 here.
Overclocking and general card management can be performed via TriXX overclocking tool, which is available to Sapphire’s Select Club (free for Sapphire enthusiasts to join online). Initial results we have suggest that cards can be overclocked to 960MHz with ease.
The I/O panel features two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 outs, one HDMI 1.4a and two DVIs.
Specially designed Toxic cooler with three heatpipes does a good cooling job and, as we’ve said before, runs quiet when fan regulation is at AUTO.
Higher overclocking will probably require manually increasing fan RPM, which will make it louder.
Initial results suggest that Sapphire’s HD 6850 Toxic Edition outruns the reference HD 6850 by about 7%, whereas overclocking boosted the advantage to 20%.
Stay tuned as we’ll have the full review soon.