Radeon HD 6850: Asus vs MSI vs PowerColor vs Sapphire

The Radeon HD 6850 is an awesome mid price range graphics card, and performs/is priced very similar to that of NVidia’s GeForce GTX 460 1 GB card. Recently, TomsHardware reviewed three modified vendor cards: Asus, MSI, PowerColor, and Sapphire versions of the Radeon HD 6850 and here I’ll summarize their findings.

Sometimes when sorting through the assortment of card brands can be frightening, as they all appear very similar but are priced slightly differently. Most of the Radeon HD 6850’s here a listed at a round $200 right now, but they all have very slight differences in performance.

Heat/Noise: Asus seemed to come out on the cooler side with the lowest temperature, and Sapphire is second when its fan is turned to max. The noisiest card was the Sapphire, which is not surprising with its fan having to be turned so high. The surprising bit however is that the Asus card was not not only the coolest, but the quietist!

Power/Efficiency: The Asus had the lowest power consumption, followed by the MSI card. Overall, Asus had a 3.9% more efficiency on average for all cards combined, but Sapphires power consumption makes it the most efficient “fast” card as the author Thomas Soderstrom states.

End result: Overall the Sapphire and PowerColor cards has the best performance in the testing game benchmarks. However, the article wanted to find the best performance value, which included the divided actual price by the class average and then had the percentages scaled.

The price to performance resulted in Asus as the winner! However every card also came with its separate perks (game cards, cables etc.) so below I will include a chart to determine your best fit.