Every review I've seen of DirectCU (On any card, google "DirectCU review") has shown excellent results, including the 6850 ( ).Īnyhow, I haven't heard anything bad about the DirectCU until now. There are also multiple models, some with 2-pipe others with 3. If your goal is to cool as best as possible and ignore noise, than the stock fan profile benchmarks don't give you valid results. I always assumed the ultimate goal of a video card cooler was to keep the card within acceptable temp levels, while being as quiet as possible. The Gigabyte could be as loud as all hell, and the DirectCU might cool better when used with comparable fan speeds (or just plain noise levels). I'll agree it may not cool the best, it probably can't compete with dual fans, but you can't comment on its total potential when you ignore the fanspeed. The 5830 review clearly stated the ASUS was 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.Click to expand.A failure in cooling, or noise (we'll assume = fan speed). 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. 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.ĬonclusionWhile 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. We’d love to see how far the card could go with a less limiting tool. 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). At least the cooler knocked 10 oC from the load GPU temperature, even if the card did consume 11W more power while doing so.Īt 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. 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. 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). Performance and OverclockingAs 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. 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. This 92mm fan blows down onto an aluminium heatsink, with air also travelling through onto the PCB and the memory chips.Īs 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 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.