Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 OC Review - PAGE 2

The Sapphire HD 7850 Overclocked Edition comes in a large black box that lists the model number in the middle, the key features along the bottom and model specific features on the right. Nestled between this wording though is a image of a camouflaged girl on the front armed with guns locked and loaded for battle. No doubt this image is used to illustrate the raw gaming potential of the graphics card by appealing to our inner geek in more ways than one.

The reverse panel includes another image of the camouflaged babe, and a large section that lists the multiple awards Sapphire's products have collected throughout the years. The main purpose of this panel however is to give the consumer plenty of information about the graphics card, as well as the edge HD 7850 intends to deliver compared to the competition. The right side of the box lists all the key features of the graphics card including the GCN architecture, GDDR5 memory, as well as support for Eyefinity, CrossFireX, PCIe 3.0, AMD App Acceleration, DirectX 11, and HD3D technologies.

As always, Sapphire didn't skimp out when it comes to the bundled accessories. In total, the HD 7850 OC comes with a single 4-pin to 6-pin power adapter, a CrossFireX bridge, a 1.8 meter High Speed HDMI cable, along with a mini-DP to DP and DVI to VGA convertors.

The Sapphire HD 7850 OC is built around the Pitcairn Pro graphics processor which has a die size of 212mm², and packs in a total of 2.8 billion internal transistors. Additionally, the Pitcairn Pro GPU is based on the GCN architecture and internally has 16 compute units, which equates to a total of 1024 streaming processors. The rest of the specifications include 32 ROPs and 64 texture units. Since the GPU engine is overclocked, this model's frequency is set to 920MHz giving it a compute performance of over 1.76TFLOPS. The card also comes with a 2GB GDDR5 fame buffer that is clocked at 1250MHz (5000MHz effective) and runs on a 256-bit memory interface. Compared to the reference clocks, the core and memory are overclocked 6.5% and 4%, respectively.

Physically, the HD 7850 OC is similar to other dual fan models recently released by Sapphire. This gives the card two centrally mounted fans that are attached to a boxy shroud. The surface of the shroud also has raised sections above the left most fan, and there are three red dots along the corner. Initially these appeared to be for LED lighting, but in fact they are just used for aesthetics as there are no LEDs connected to the graphics card.

Since the HD 7850 is based on the GCN architecture, it supports both PowerTune technology and Zero Core Power. PowerTune is basically a power management system that maximizes the performance of the board via dynamic power adjustment. It does this by increasing the GPU clock speed in real time when the GPU detects power headroom, and throttling the clocks when a certain power limit is exceeded. This allows the board to adjust the clock speeds on a microsecond level. The maximum PowerTune rating for the HD 7850 is a low 3 watts when idle and 130 watts at load.

Since the Sapphire HD 7850 OC's power requirements are under 200 watts, there is no need for a second PEG power connector. The connector is found at the back of the card and is positioned at a 90° angle. If you have seen the reference board you know that it also has a single power connector, but the connectors pins are facing the side of the PCB, making installing the power cable easier inside a cramped case. However, since the PCB of the Sapphire model measures only 8.2", it can fit into smaller mid-sized cases and generally avoids any spacing issues when it comes to connecting the power cable.

Most of the Southern Islands graphics cards utilze the standard video output configraution and the Sapphire model is no exeption. This gives the board a total of two Mini-DP connectors, a single HDMI 1.4a connector and a Dual-Link DVI connector. Like the rest of the cards in the series, the HD 7850 does not have a stacked DVI design which increases the efficiency of the airflow and reduces the turbulence, but limits Eyefinity support. However, since Sapphire has included an HDMI to DVI converter, losing the port is essentially a moot issue. Additionally, MST Hubs should become available this year which will allow six monitors to be supported via the two DisplayPorts.

The two on-board Mini-DP ports use the 1.2 standard, enabling support for up to three monitors per port (via MST Hub), as well as AMD HD3D technology. The middle HDMI 1.4a connector also supports 3GHz speeds with frame packing. Essentially this allows the connection to run the frames faster, thus creating a smoother gaming experience. The HDMI and DP ports can also be teamed together to support HD3D Surround, which is a feature new to Eyefinity 2.0.