Radeon HD 6850

Radeon HD 6850 belongs to the upper segment of the so-called mainstream. The number of stream processors relative to the Radeon HD 6870 has decreased from 1120 to 960 pieces. The GPU simply had two SIMD cores disabled. In the HD 5000 series, disabled cores could not be enabled, even by flashing the BIOS from the older card. This fact does not allow us to count on success this time. But when it becomes possible to check it, then of course, it will be used.

The GPU clock speed has also dropped from 900 MHz to 775 MHz. It is possible that this difference can be partially covered by GPU overclocking, although disabled cores cannot be replaced by any increase in frequencies. Both video cards carry on board one gigabyte of GDDR5 video memory. The memory bus has not changed since the previous generation and is 256 bits. Unfortunately, the clock frequencies of the video memory are not indicated, so we will have to determine them on our own.

The peak consumption of the HD 6850 graphics card is lower than that of its older brother at 24 watts. If with all the "reductions" the video card has not lost the same percentage of performance, then this is an excellent result.

Note that the HD 6870 requires two six-pin connectors for additional power. While the HD 6850 is content with only one such connector. Here is another difference from the 5,000th series, where the entire HD 5800 sub-series, including the "subcompact" HD 5830, was equipped with two six-pin connectors.

The number of ports for both video cards is the same. At our disposal: two DVI, two mini Display Port and one HDMI.