Roundup: Four Radeon HD 6850 1 GB Cards Compared

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Improvements to performance, acoustics, and bundles can add big value once a reference graphics card is modified by third-party vendors. We compare four modified Radeon HD 6850 1 GB boards to find out which company's additions best suit your gaming needs.

Benchmark Results: Crysis

Crysis tortures every part of a modern system in spite of its age. Fortunately, 1680x1050 appears playable at Very High detail levels.

We had to take notes on minimum frame rates to assure playability with anti-aliasing enabled. MSI’s reference-clocked card drops to 18 FPS, while the rest barely meet our 20 FPS minimum qualification.

AA must be disabled to play smoothly at our 1920x1080 target resolution, where our notes say the slowest card stays above 20 FPS (minimum). The fastest card in the group, PowerColor’s PCS+ AX6850 only reaches 19 FPS with AA enabled.

Playing Crysis at 2560x1600 on any of these cards would require drastic drops in detail level.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.