Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

The 7850 OC from Sapphire uses a custom 7850 PCB and is remarkably small from every angle. The card is covered by a large plastic cooler which sits over the whole PCB with a dual fan design sitting on a dual slot cooler. The two fans are said to operate with a low noise output and are situated over the alumiunium fin heatsink which makes direct contact with the GPU core through the baseplate.

The two large fans are black in colour to match the cooler and are situated central to the card. One odd thing that we did notice on the cooler, is the inclusion of three red plastic screw type mouldings, which we first assumed may have been LEDs but it turns out that are just for aesthetics but looks quite out of place in our opinion.

Under the cooler you will find two copper heatpipes that pass right through the cooler at the very ends and connect directly into the baseplate to help dissipate heat.

Taking a look at the power, we find a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector situated at the end of the card.

Moving towards the end of the card, we find a single CrossFire connector allowing two of the cards to be run together in a multi-GPU configuration.

Finally moving to the rear I/O, we find the usual suspects of connectors with a single dual-link DVI connector, HDMI port and two mini DisplayPort connectors and with the added inclusion of mini DP to DisplayPort and HDMI to DVI adapters, you have quite a lot of functionality with connecting monitors to your outputs.

Generally we’d see speeds of 860MHz on the core/GPU clock and 1200Mhz on the memory, but being an OC edition, Sapphire have ramped things up a bit and not just with the core clock, but the memory too. The core clock has been taken up another 60MHz bringing it to 920MHz while the memory has also gone up 50MHz giving 1250MHz (5Gbps effective). Sapphire were very keen to push this card, and with those figures, we should see some good performance increases when we look at our benchmarks.