Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Review

Overclocking

So now it’s time to see how far we can push this card before it gives out on us. I started out small going for an overclock of 850 MHz on the core, and as always and I left the memory at its stock 1100. I had no problems, so I decided to push a little further and I took it up to 927 MHz and I left the memory at 1100 MHz just to be safe. Again, I had no problems. So, then I decided to see if I could get over 1 GHz. As you can see from the screen shot below, I did not. I was only able to reach 950 MHz on the core and 1175 MHz on the memory with the voltage the stock 1.175 Volts. I tried the memory at 1200 but it wouldn’t do it even with a little more voltage.

For all of the overclocking I used the Sapphire Trixx utility because of its ability to change the core voltage of the GPU. The ability to do this gives us the advantage of higher clocks that just can’t be reached in the Catalyst Control Center.

I ran 3DMark 11 on its extreme preset once again to see what the difference would be with an overclock that was over the 1 GHz limit. Unfortunately I didn’t get there, but hey 950Mhz isn’t too shabby. As you can see there was a noticeable difference from its stock setting of 820 MHz 3DMark 11 Score of 1171: a difference of 42 3DMarks, to be exact. To test the stability of the overclocks at each interval I ran the Furmark Benchmark at 1680×1050 resolution for one minute. If it crashed I threw it out, but if it passed I kept it.