Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell March 21, 2012 Featured Tech Reviews, Graphics

Rating: 9.0.

We have been hard at work for the last week reviewing many new 7000 series cards from AMD's leading partners. In this review today we are looking at the new Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition which features a custom cooling solution and out of the box clock speed enhancements.

Sapphire are AMD's largest and longest standing partner and their custom cooling solutions have been leading the way in the last year. We reviewed the HD7850 reference card on launch day and noted that it ran cool and quiet, so we have high expectations that this custom Sapphire card will improve dramatically on the reference design.

Product	AMD HD7970	AMD HD7950	AMD HD7870	Sapphire HD7850 OC
Core Clock speed	925mhz	800mhz	1000mhz	860mhz (920mhz)
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	118.4 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	29.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,375mhz	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz (1250mhz)
Memory Data Rate	5.5 GBps	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps (5.0Gbps)
Memory Bandwidth	264 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

Sapphire have overclocked both the core and the GDDR5 memory. The core clock speed is increased to 920mhz and the memory receives a 50mhz boost to 1,250mhz (5.0Gbps effective)

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7 comments

Raymond D
March 21, 2012 at 3:53 pm

Excellent, nice little card, I do think it will cost more than £200 however as even some of the basic cards are 195.
Jeffrey Bennicom
March 21, 2012 at 3:54 pm

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.
Raymond Rne
March 22, 2012 at 8:08 am

Nice lookin card, again from sapphire
Peter
April 8, 2012 at 1:42 am

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.