Gigabyte GV-R6850OC-1GD

The Radeon HD 6850 GPU, codenamed Barts, is almost a year old and thus is getting a little long in the tooth. It's no surprise then to find that Gigabyte produces only two cards with this aging GPU.

The GV-R6850OC-1GD comes from the firm's Ultra Durable VGA series but thankfully is factory overclocked.

So whereas standard Radeon HD 6850 cards are specified to run their core and memory at frequencies of 775MHz and 4,000MHz, this Gigabyte card runs its bits at 820MHz and 4,200MHz respectively. This is a substantial overclock and, as a result, the Gigabyte was quite a strong performer when we fed it our benchmarks.

In our Heaven v2.0 benchmark for instance this card spat out framerates of 52.0fps, 33.6fps and 29.3fps at 1,024 x 768, 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 pixels. Standard clocked Radeon HD 6850 cards are noticeably slower, which means that you'll only be able to game at 1,024 x 768 pixels if you want a smooth, immersive gaming experience when you're running DirectX 11 games with high detail settings.

Like most of the cards in this round-up the GV-R6850OC-1GD features a custom cooler that comprises a reasonably sized heatsink and two cooling fans. Unfortunately, when it came to testing we could hear the cooling system working though it was far from distracting.

Verdict:If you're on a tight budget the GV-R6850OC-1GD is worthy of consideration thanks to its pre-overclocked core and memory.