Our previous review covered Saphire Radeon HD 6850 running at reference clocks, whereas our today’s test subject is Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic. As the name suggests, Toxic cards come with Toxic cooling but Sapphire surprised us by using HD 6870’s PCB for its HD 6850 Toxic. Although Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic looks different than the HD 6870, it is only due to the shroud as the cooler design is identical to the HD 6870’s.
HD 6850's GPU reference clocks are at 775MHz, with memory running at 1000MHz (4000MHz effectively). The HD 6850 Toxic on the other hand runs at 820MHz for the GPU and 1100MHz for the memory (4400Mhz effectively).
The picture below shows Sapphire HD 6850 and Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic cards, and they are visibly different.
Sapphire HD 6850 runs at reference clocks but Sapphire has made a few changes to their design that separates this card from the other reference AMD designs.
Below you see the GPUZ screenshot, confirming the clocks on our Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic card.
Sapphire HD 6850 card is based on BartsPro core, which compared to the previous generation offers improvements on the field of tessellation, Eyefinity, video decoding and consumption. UVD engine is now in UVD 3 version; there’s also HDMI 1.4a for 3D Blu-ray as well as two DisplayPort 1.2 outs. The DisplayPorts support Multi-Stream technology, allowing up to 6 monitors to be used via only two DisplayPorts.