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The Pitcairn cards are without question the best buy in the new 7 series of AMD hardware. The HD7950 and HD7970 are assuredly the performance leaders, but the £360+ asking price is prohibitive for most people.
If we look at the Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition which we reviewed today, it offers comparable performance to the last generation HD6970, at a fraction of the cost. In regards to maximum ‘bang for the buck', the HD7850 is hard to beat right now.
The Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition builds upon the excellent reference card performance, while lowering noise levels significantly and increasing both core and memory speeds for additional frame rates. The two fan cooler is both quiet and attractive, fully utilising the thick copper heatpipes to transfer heat from the core as quickly as possible.
There is a huge amount of headroom on the HD7850 core and we maximised the sliders in Catalyst Control Center without experiencing instability to 1050mhz core /1450mhz memory. We would imagine that 1100mhz+ is possible thanks to the excellent Sapphire cooler but we need an updated TriXX tool to fully support this hardware.
When overclocked to 1050mhz, the HD7850 is only a little behind the GTX580 which is incredible considering the price difference. The PitCairn cards really do come into their own when pushed past the 1GHZ mark thanks to the excellent shader performance and 256 bit memory interface.
The Sapphire HD7850 card is the finest card we have tested in this range and would be ideal for a high performance media center, due to the very low noise levels. We would imagine there will be a small price premium when this card is available, but we would assume that Sapphire will want to hit the £200 inc vat price point.
Pros:
- Almost silent.
- Great performance.
- plenty of overclocking headroom.
- runs cool.
Cons:
- Nothing.
Kitguru says: A fantastic, high value for money gaming card which produces very little noise and heat.
Excellent, nice little card, I do think it will cost more than £200 however as even some of the basic cards are 195.
The XFX cards look much nicer IMO, but the cooler on the Sapphire cards is well thought out. Every card has a different cooler construction too, XFX tend to use the same cooler and heatpipe config between a whole range of cards, which works well on the mid or low level card, but not so good on the higher end model.
Nice lookin card, again from sapphire
If one fan would break, you will have to buy a new full heatsink solution because is impossible get a replacement of one fan. Bad for Sapphire.