Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Review

Temperature Testing

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how the HIS Radeon HD 6850 Turbo did at idle and under a full load.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Idle Temperature:

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Card Load Temperature:

As you can see from the screen shots above, the idle state of the Sapphire Radeon HD 6800 series drops the GPU core clock frequency down to 300MHz and the memory clock down to 300MHz to help conserve power and lower temperatures. At idle in the NZXT Phantom the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic video cards’ temperature was observed at 42C during idle.

We fired up FurMark and ran the stability at 640×480, which was enough to put the GPU core at 100% load in order to get the highest load temperature possible. This application also charts the temperature results so you can see how the temperature rises and levels off, which is very nice. The fans on the video cards were left on auto during temperature testing. When we hit the space bar to stop the rendering the temperature dropped.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Furmark Load Temperature:

As we can see from the chart above the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic has a very high load temperature at 84C. I think this has a lot to do with the reference design of the card with the reference cooler as well. Although it idles at an acceptable temperature it is still the highest among those that we tested for the review. I would really like to see Sapphire’s Vapor X cooler on a card like this to see what temperature difference can be made.