Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Taking a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card was a blast. It has all of the features we have come to expect from a 6800 series video card. Although it performed well at its factory overclocked settings, it did tend to run a lot hotter than all of the cards that we took a look at for this article. Another spot where it just didn’t shine through and go above and beyond like some of its counterparts was in the over clocking. We were only able to get the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card to 950MHz; beyond that I could not find a stable medium between the voltage, the core clock and the memory clock. With other cards in its price point being able to be overclocked above the 1GHz mark the overclocking for the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card was not what we thought it was going to be especially since it comes with the ability to plug two six pin power connectors to it for the extra voltage jump.

No matter what games or benchmarks I threw at the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card at resolutions of 1680×1050 or 1280×1024 it lapped them up like a thirsty dog in the middle of the desert and it didn’t stutter once. Even graphics intensive games like Metro 2033 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 were absolutely playable at the highest settings. And it ate through Direct X 10 and below games with no problem. During normal game play the fan on the card never really went above the 56% mark, and even at that high of a speed you could hear the fan but it was in no way overbearing or disruptive.

Aside from that little bit of negativity the card ran really well at its factory speeds and was able to keep up with the other cards in its class, even coming in at a dead tie with the HIS 6850 in a lot of the benchmarks. If you want a card that is going to run stable and give you the performance that we all expect from Sapphire the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card is a really good choice. Just make sure you don’t want high overclocks and make sure your case has plenty of ventilation and airflow to help keep the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card nice and cool during heavy loads.

As far as price point goes the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card has a two year warranty and will set you back about $184.99 with free shipping.

The Legit Bottom Line: Even though it runs a bit hotter than the other cards we looked at it still performed just as well as they did at its factory over clocked settings. Some others said they were able to get this card over the 1GHz mark; I wasn’t able to but it didn’t matter. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Video Card still ran great.