A Closer Look
The card’s main feature is that it uses a pair of rather large 100mm fans, these are your traditional axial style fans.
The profile of the card is bang on 2 PCI slots and it measures in at 25.5 cm or 10.04 inches.
The XFX FX7850 draws power from a pair of 6 pin PCIe connectors.
There is a single CrossFireX finger for 2 way CFX support only.
The PCB is entirely black which is always great to see. There are void warranty stickers on the screws so sadly you can’t change out the cooler’s thermal paste or anything like that.
The cooling solution uses a pair of chunky 8mm heatpipes to move heat away from the GPU’s core.
The heatsink design is more of a monolithic aluminium “lump” than the traditional fin-based heatsink design we normally see. This is clearly a cost-cutting measure by XFX.
The rear I/O features two mini DP, HDMI and dual DVI. With an MST Hub on one of the DP ports you can run six displays off this card – a very nice feature that Nvidia cards of the same price point just do not have.
The entire unit is covered in a metal shroud branded with the XFX logo.
The end of the card is open for maximum ventilation.
As we mentioned the card uses more or less totally stock AMD settings of 860MHz core and 1200 (4800 – effective)MHz memory.
XFX used to be exclusively a nVidia partner before jumping ship to AMD. They haven’t been partners with AMD/ATi for nearly as long as Sapphire for example. I think they swapped partners about halfway through the HD 4000 series, I remember the last XFX/nVidia card I tested was a GTX 9800.
epic (:
typo page 3, Testing Procedure, “The test the performance of video cards… ” should be “To test …”
thank you!
ur welcome 🙂
You mentioned there’s no point going beyond 1050Mhz core. Why not? bypass the limits and you could squeeze another 100mhz (at least) from that core, no voltage changes needed
I say there is no point because most driver/software loopholes that allow you to circumvent these limits have been shut with updates. If you can find a way around the limit without voiding your warranty then definitely – it’s worth trying to go further but if you can’t I wouldn’t recommend risking your warranty to go further.