VTX3D Radeon HD 6850 X-Edition Graphics Card Review
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
VTX3D incorporate a lot of red into their logo and it seems as though they’ve tried to do the same with the card as it sits on a red PCB with a frosted red plastic cooler. Two stickers are present on the plastic casing of which one informs us that this is an X-Edition card. Whilst X-Edition is a great name, we do feel quite let down in the fact that it means nothing substantial. Between the PCB and red plastic covering is a aluminium fin style design heatsink.
Sitting at the heart of the card is a large fan with VTX3D branding. The blades of the fan are nothing out of the ordinary, and we can also see that the heatsink incorporates a copper heatpipe design towards the top of the card.
As the card uses reference clocks, we find a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector as expected. It’s only when we start to move into the higher range Radeon cards that we see more power being needed.
Moving along the card, we find a single CrossFire connector and as we saw earlier, VTX3D do bundle a Crossfire connector in with the card, leaving you in the situation where you just need to purchase the second card and off you go for some extreme dual GPU action.
The rear I/O is something that always interests us on AMD based graphics cards, due to the inclusion of Eyefinity, it opens up a lot of doorways for a vendor such as VTX3D to tinker with. It simply allows them to dictate which ports they will want to include. On the rear of this card, we find two dual-link DVI ports, a HDMI port and two Mini DisplayPorts. There is also a small area for ventilation which works in conjunction with the fan and cooler to help exhaust heat to the rear of your card and out the back of the chassis.
Under GPU-Z and many of our benchmark tools, the card was identified as a 6850X2, though this is a mistake. It comes packed with a overclocked 800MHz core speed and 1050MHz memory clock speed, making 4200MHz effective. The speeds have been cranked up ever so slightly from the stock 775MHz/4000MHz combination, so it should allow for some good performance in our benchmark tests.
