VisionTek Radeon HD 6850 Temperatures

It's hard to know exactly when the first video card got overclocked, and by whom. What we do know is that it's hard to imagine a computer enthusiast or gamer today that doesn't overclock their hardware. Of course, not every video card has the head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they generate straight from the factory. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

Before stressing the video card to its extremes, I want to get a good baseline for how the card runs at idle. I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature reported by the GPU to get this number. After that's taken care of I want to really stress the card. I use FurMark to do this. It is important to remember that, with FurMark, we will get temperature and power consumption numbers that are probably far above anything a game could produce. I run FurMark at full blast on the stress settings with everything turned all the way for 20 minutes before checking the temps. At the same time, the idle temps were taken after sitting at the desktop for 20 min after a cool start up. While checking the temperatures of the card, the ambient room temperature remained stable at 22C. I use an open-air test bench for testing, so air restriction is not a problem.

Despite the changes in fan placement and the lower clock speeds of the Radeon HD 6850, the VisionTek Radeon HD 6850 touts temperatures almost exactly the same as the VisionTek 6870.

When overclocked, the GPU temperatures raise slightly, but considering the performance upgrade that the overclock provides, it's worth it. With only a single fan on the VisionTek 6850, even when cranked up to 100%, it wasn't very noisy. If I concentrated, I could hear it, but it wasn't loud. With the fan on auto, I didn't hear a thing.

Overclocking

Since Afterburner got its upgrade, overclocking has become a lot less limited. Since the Radeon HD 6850 is so close in nature to the HD 6870, it has a lot of overclock potential. To overclock the VisionTek Radeon HD 6850, I used the Afterburner program from MSI.

I increased the auxiliary voltage and memory voltage for the VisionTek Radeon HD 6850 using Afterburner by the maximum available values. For the GPU core voltage I slowly increased until I reached a value of 920. I haven't had much luck with any card operating above this. In the end, I was able to achieve excellent results with the overclocking. The VisionTek Radeon HD 6850 reached a GPU core clock speed of 1000MHz, up from the stock 775MHz it came with. That is the exact same speed I reached with the MSI 6870 Hawk. That constitutes an increase of almost 30%. With the memory, I was able to achieve stability at 1150MHz, up from 1000MHz. That increase is about 15%.

The excellent overclocking that we achieved with the VisionTek Radeon HD 6850 made it pretty equal to a Radeon HD 6870 at overclocked speeds. It also made it very comparable to the much more expensive GTX 570 in many cases. Realize that these results are not typical and each piece of hardware is different.

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