Sapphire 11180-00-20R HD6850 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card

I purchased this card to replace my temporary GeFOrce GT430 in my main PC - a custom built box with a Gigabyte M68M-S2P running a Phenom II X4 955 and an OCZ ModXStream Pro 500w PSU inside.
Compared to my old GT430 this card blows it away. Admittedly the first card I received worked once then never again - it would just cause the PSU's short protection to kick in. In light of how impressed I am with this card I won't deduct points from it's score.
Anyways, with the card installed (a darn tight squeeze on my motherboard - I had to buy some incredibly small SATA cables to get the blighter to fit in!)I fired up the PC and it booted immediately. A quick trip to AMD/ATI/whatever-the-heck-they-call-themselves provided me with the drivers for both Windows 7 x64 (which rates this card at 7.7 for both Graphics categories) and Debian 6
I connected the card to my IIYama Vision Master Pro 450 (twenty pounds from that favorite auction site!) and it looked incredible. 1600x1200 at 85Hz or (technically unsupported by the monitor) 1920x1440 at 75Hz provided excellent 3D performance - easily handling anything I could throw at it - Crysis (2) ran incredibly well on it - easily more than 150FPS.
It is a fairly cheap card for what it does and how well it performs and I would certainly recommend this card to anyone looking for a good powerful PCI-e card.
It just works day-in-day-out. This review may be a bit on the short side but what can you say about this card? It's excellent!

I got this card for my first pc build and it has not disappointed me at all. It runs all the games I have tried at high spec and runs and a very smoother fps. hasn't been tested on the latest high spec games like Skyrim and Battlefield, but I'm sure it will have no issues.

Greta value for money and easy to fit into any case. Great Purchase!

This AMD Radeon HD6850 card is approx 3.5 x 11 x 23 cm in size and fills two slots on our motherboard. It has twin DVI outs [one is a Dual Link DVI-I that can work larger resolution monitors and output to a VGA screen, and the other is a single link DVI-D that's digital only and can't run a VGA display]. There's also an HDMI TV socket and a Display Port socket [the latter can feed video to a third monitor]. A 4pin Molex to 6 pin PCIe power plug convertor cable is supplied, along with a DVI to VGA socket convertor but ours had no Crossfire link cable for twin 6850 cards in AMD Crossfire mode [similar to NVidia's SLi]. This Sapphire 11180-00-20R retail box didn't include a 1m HDMI lead either, but otherwise is identical the 11180-00-40R retail boxed version that does have both the Crossfire patch cable and the HDMI lead [so I'd definately buy the latter if it's the same price and get the freebie stuff]. There's also a simple install guide pamphlet and a driver DVD. This £110ish mid range 6850 gaming card is the one on techie magazine PCPro's A List [best Value Graphics Card].

My 15 year old son's 4 year old Mesh gaming PC has an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard just upgraded with a new AMD Phenom 640 Quad core 3.0GHz processor, Windows 7 64-bit, and 8Gb of 800MHz DDR2 system RAM. It's Sapphire ATI 4770 512Mb was a respectable gaming card in its day, however as I was adding 64-bit Windows 7, I thought I'd take the opportunity to upgrade the graphics card to a modern one with 1Gb memory and DirectX 11 compatibility. The motherboard has two full 16x PCI express slots [Sli], but they are version one [250Mb/second] and this Sapphire 6850 card is PCIe version two [500Mb/second] compatible. The card is fully backwards compatible to PCIe 16x version 1 slots though, albeit it running throttled back in this mode.

Prior to install I unloaded the 4770 graphics drivers, switched off the PC and swapped over the graphics cards and the separate 6 pin PSU power supply lead [only one 6 pin supply is needed for a single 6850 card in non-Crossfire mode]. Fitting was easy, and the card tapers in a bit in the back by about 1cm on the second slot, giving a little more space at the rear so nothing was snagged on our motherboard. I restarted the PC and loaded the latest AMD drivers via the internet, and this 6850 card ran perfectly [Sapphire recommend a PC PSU of at least 500w rating, ours was 550w]. It was difficult to notice any real improvement after the upgrade, as the old card was no slouch, so I used FutureMark's 3DMark03 to get a more precise measurement of the graphics processing speed increase. The old Sapphire 4770 card scored 38,858 and this new Sapphire 6850 card scored 58,250 under 2DMark 2003. So the PCs 3D graphics processing is now effectively running 150% faster with the new card [under Windows 7 64-bit]. This 1.5x faster speed is actually the theoretical processing difference between the two cards hardware - a pretty good result considering the limitations of the version one 16x PCIe slot and the age of the motherboard. After the upgrade basic 2D Office chores were unchanged though, with the PCMark 7 score barely raising from 2,407 to 2,414 afterwards.

This budget gaming card seems to run stable, with no more crashes than normal [a relatively common occurrence with teenager's software burdened PCs and games such as BattleField 3]. We used a long 10m HDMI lead to take the video out to my sons 26" LCD TV, and that worked with no problems [display duplicated on PC and TV and it can output sound if wanted]. Noise wise the 6850 card is no louder than the old 4770 card, probably as the case and stock CPU cooler fans are noisier anyway. Overall, a great budget gaming card, and a useful upgrade for our four year old PC. Plus the card also looks great, and I can get around £30 selling our old Sapphire 4770 graphics card on eBay, so it's even a bit green as well.