Sapphire HD6850 TOXIC Edition Review

Sapphire HD6850 TOXIC Edition Review

3D Mark Vantage

For testing we’re going up against the HIS Digital HD6850 we reviewed at the launch of the HD68 series from AMD. At stock the TOXIC is about the same as the reference HD6850, but its ability to benefit from an overclock is someting else entirely.

At most the reference card gained 90 points for a healthy overclock, but the Sapphire TOXIC is almost a different card giving massive gains across the board. Nearly 17000 P-Score for a sub £200 card is magnificent. Hopefully it will keep this up through the rest of the tests.

Unigine Heaven

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The Unigine benchmark is notoriously hefty and it takes a huge increase in performance to get any benefits at all in the results. Although you could be forgiven for sneering at a mere 1.5FPS increase with the overclock compared to the stock card, for the Heaven benchmark that’s a significant increase. The maximum frame-rate hints at how much extra power is available to us.

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With the image quality increased to biblical levels the Sapphire card really comes into its own. At stock it pulls an extra couple of frames over the reference designed card, and when overclocked it ekes another couple of frames again. The difference between 25 and 30 frames per second is the difference between unplayable and bearable. This is one of those times when the results might not contain big numbers, but what they represent is huge.