ATI Radeon HD 6850 Review

Value and Conclusion

The arrival of the HD 6850 1GB and its compatriot, the HD 6870 1GB is bringing a full reshuffle of graphics card pricing, and we’re still not certain where every card will be once the dust settles. What we do know though is that the HD 6850 1GB will be launching at around £155, with some board partners dropping as low as £135. Compared to the £160+ that the Radeon HD 5830 1GB has been retailing for, this sets the HD 6850 1GB rather nicely.

However, throughout our testing the HD 6850 1GB and GTX 460 1GB were almost inseparable when it came to pure performance, with the difference between the two cards being marginal overall. At time of writing, the cheapest GTX 460 1GB comes in at £155.10, putting these two cards at a comparable price point already, and we’d be surprised if Nvidia didn’t drop a cheeky price drop just to spice things up too.

With these two very capable cards at such a similar price and performing within a few frame-per-second of each other too we look to power consumption and thermals to differentiate them and here the HD 6850 has an edge. Pulling 229W at load to the GTX 460 1GB’s 270W the HD 6850 1GB is the more bill-friendly, although the stock cooled model does run 4°C hotter than the GTX 460 1GB. We understand that most HD 6850 1GB board partner cards will ship with some degree of custom cooling though (similarly to the GTX 460 1GB in-fact) so cooling will likely differ from model to model.


Really, there’s little so little to split the HD 6850 1GB and GTX 460 1GB that we’re having to come down to extra features such as single card multi-monitor support (ATI) or PhysX (Nvidia) to decide between them, but such extras will likely be down to personal preference. Both cards are capable mid-range models and with a price war looking likely in the run up to Christmas it’s consumers who win in the end.

Like the HD 6870 1GB, the HD 6850 1GB isn’t the revelatory jump in performance we’d been hoping for, but as a foil for Nvidia’s dominance of the mid-range and a lever with which to crank down prices, it’ll do nicely.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

Score Guide