Asus Radeon HD 7850 Direct CU II 2GB GDDR5 - Deejay's Review

[deejayburnout]

Good Evening Peeps

After a wait of 4 days, my new Asus Radeon HD 7850 has arrived. Purchased from Overclockers.co.uk for £149.99 came bundled with Far Cry 3, Nexuiz & Sleeping Dogs and due to a halloween promotion, free delivery. Not bad at all.

UNBOXING

Opened the big boring brown cardboard box and was surprised to find 2 small packets of haribo tangfastic. Nom Nom

Also there was this



inside that box was this box



Opening that box i came apon another box ( there is a trend here )



This contained installation booklet, driver disk, crossfire cable and a D-Sub to Dvi Adaptor. Tossing those to one side i delved in further and found



Tearing open the bag and i feasted my eyes on what i paid for









It measures 11inch x 4inch x 1.5inch or 279mm x 102mm x 38mm. A Long card so you will need a big case for it. The cooler hangs 60mm over the end of the card.

This being the V2 version of the card, the 1 x 6pin power supply is placed in a more convenient position, making installation easier and no cut fingers to be had here.

Here are the specs of the car




- Core Clock: 860MHz
- Memory: 2048MB GDDR5
- Memory Clock: 4800MHz (Effective)
- Memory Interface: 256-Bit
- Processing Cores: 1024
- Bus Type: PCI-Express 3.0
- Display Connectors: 1x Dual Link DVI, 1x Single Link DVI, 1x HDMI & 1x DisplayPort
- HDCP Capable
- DirectX 11.1 Support
- OpenGL 4.2 Support

INSTALLATION



My trusty case before the install. You will notice the small ATI x600 graphics card that i was using to replace my crappy XFX HD 6850 that was under RMA.





After installing the ASUS which just fitted. I had to move my DVD drive up a slot. Looks nice in there.

Took about 15mins so not to bad.

FAN SPEED, TEMPS AND NOISE

Idle Temps



Full load temps

[deejayburnout]

BENCHMARKS

I ran Heaven DX11 Benchmark 3.0 and this is what i got



GAMING

as my monitors are limited to 1680 x 1050 so no HD testing for me

Mechwarrior online



High settings gave me these kinda frame rates





Very High settings gave me



When playing this, the frame rates were all over the place. Most probably because its a beta at the moment. Never seemed to get choppy at all.

Borderlands 2



These settings give me



Not to bad to be honest

[Rob_B]

Have you kept the fan speed low on purpose? If 62c @ 15% then have you tried bumping it up another 10% to see how it affects temps or is that speed as you've dropped back to 2D?

How'd it compare to the (working) 6850?

[deejayburnout]

Have you kept the fan speed low on purpose? If 62c @ 15% then have you tried bumping it up another 10% to see how it affects temps or is that speed as you've dropped back to 2D?

The fan speed was totally controlled by the card. If i were to manually turn it up, the temp will drop quite well. When gaming now, i turn it up to 40% and temps are kept even lower.

Here is it at 40% on idle

How'd it compare to the (working) 6850?

Big difference. i can play my games on the same settings as before and FPS are up. Still tweaking those settings though.

[Willzzz]

Nice card for £150
Pity for others that all the 7850s are back up to £170 now :/

[harryj1995]

How much can you overclock it?

[deejayburnout]

How much can you overclock it?

Not done that yet but can imagine I can get pretty high from the stock with the good cooler.

After 8 hours of solid gaming last night, my fan set at 50%n the temp never went above 48deg at stock values. plenty of headroom for OC.

Just need to give it a bash.

[SOOMRO]

What you will say its better than Gtx660 & What PSU you are using?

[Willzzz]

A GTX660 is a faster card, but a 7850 is a great choice if you can find one @ £150 as in this case.

[MmmmGalaxy]

Was looking at getting one of these for an upcoming build, is the auto temp control fairly poor then? Obviously not a huge deal to change it manually but a slight nuisance I suppose.

[deejayburnout]

I wouldn't say its bad, more like the cooling is that good, the temps never get hot enough to warrant higher speeds.

If I am going to be heavy gaming I put the speed up which isn't that much of a pain. Very easy with the AMD software.

Max temp for the card is 99deg so plenty of space to play with.

[MmmmGalaxy]

Yeah it didn't look like much of an issue in your images, I'd just saw some people commenting about it elsewhere and wondered what the general opinion was.

The cooling does seem rather impressive on stock cooling, should give you a bit of room to OC.

[Rob_B]

A GTX660 is a faster card, but a 7850 is a great choice if you can find one @ £150 as in this case.

or £124

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/xfx-...s-dabs-1400917

(although XFX)..

[Willzzz]

Yeah I wouldn't pay £124 for that O_o

[deejayburnout]

I would never buy a XFX card again. Support is terrible

[dr.noob]

Hi, i bought the same card(V2) with FC3 and moh voucher, i really love the card, low power consumption and no noise at all.

You can unlock everything using Asus Gpu Tweak version 2.1.7.1, the latest does not give you full control if you want to overclock.

So, i bumped the voltage to the max i could, 1.228v and the core is stable at games with 1170, i didn't test the ram clock.