XFX Radeon HD7850 2GB Black Edition

 AMD Released Radeon HD7850 and HD7870 of video cards to the market, and now we’re going to be taking a look at XFX’s Radeon HD7850 DD Black Edition. XFX has decided to take the 7850 design, overclock it, and put on a pretty beefy cooler. Instead of your reference clocks of 860Mhz on the core and 1200Mhz memory clocks, the Black Edition card features 975Mhz on the core and 1250Mhz memory clocks.

 

I was very pleased with the performance of the XFX 7850 Black Edition. Their Dual Dissipation cooling system seems to be very effective, as it was able to keep our test card at a very reasonable 69 degrees Celsius at full load. The Ghost Thermal Technology allows the air of the fans to push through the fins of the heatsink down onto the PCB and VRMs to ensure proper cooling all the way around. The 28nm fabrication process also aided in the temperatures being so low, but it's most noticeable difference was found when we did our power draw tests. With the XFX 7850 Black Edition only drawing 260 watts of power at full load, it's safe to say it's very power efficient as well!

The makeup of the XFX 7850 Black Edition was  similar to their previous Black Edition cards.I like the design behind these cards. The brushed aluminum shroud and name plate make for something that is far from the usual design you see on reference cards.

The performance of the XFX 7850 Black Edition isn't too much different from your average run of the mill 7850, but with it's excellent cooling options we were able to overclock our card pretty far. Managing to get the card to 1200MHz on stock cooling, without any voltage control, was rather impressive to me. I'm pretty confident that if we had some sort of voltage control we could have taken the XFX 7850 even further!

With a market that has so many graphics cards to choose from, it's easy to get overwhelmed and not know what is worth the money and what isn't. As I said earlier, the XFX Black Edition 7800 cards are getting a little harder to find, so if run across one it may be your only chance to get one!