XFX Radeon HD7850 2GB Black Edition Review
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Final Thoughts and Conclusions
XFX isn’t new to the GPU market, and the 7850 Black Edition is proof that they know what they are doing. They’ve taken a successful product and improved on it by beefing up the cooling and factory overclocking it. To top it off, they’ve put their lifetime warranty on the card, just for that extra peace of mind for the buyer.
Overall I was very pleased with the performance of the XFX 7850 Black Edition. Their Dual Dissipation cooling system seems to be very effective, as it was able to keep our test card at a very reasonable 69 degrees Celsius at full load. The Ghost Thermal Technology allows the air of the fans to push through the fins of the heatsink down onto the PCB and VRMs to ensure proper cooling all the way around. The 28nm fabrication process also aided in the temperatures being so low, but it’s most noticeable difference was found when we did our power draw tests. With the XFX 7850 Black Edition only drawing 260 watts of power at full load, it’s safe to say it’s very power efficient as well!
The aesthetics of the XFX 7850 Black Edition was very similar to their previous Black Edition cards. This is fine by me as I personally like the design behind these cards. The brushed aluminum shroud and name plate make for something that is far from the usual design you see on reference cards.
The performance of the XFX 7850 Black Edition isn’t too much different from your average run of the mill 7850, but with it’s excellent cooling options we were able to overclock our card pretty far. Managing to get the card to 1200MHz on stock cooling, without any voltage control, was rather impressive to me. I’m pretty confident that if we had some sort of voltage control we could have taken the XFX 7850 even further!
With a market that has so many graphics cards to choose from, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and not know what is worth the money and what isn’t. As I said earlier, the XFX Black Edition 7800 cards are getting a little harder to find, so if run across one it may be your only chance to get one!
Legit Bottom Line: The XFX 7850 Black Edition brings solid performance with the reliability of an XFX product. When you’re considering a new mid range gaming graphics card, put the XFX 7850 Black Edition near the top of your list.
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