HIS Radeon 6850 1GB Graphics Card

A Closer Look

The card itself is of a size that we would be expecting, albeit about half inch shorter than a 6850 reference card and therefore as expected is about an inch shorter than a 6870 reference. Even still there would be no issues in slotting this into a mid-sized chassis. The card will require two expansion slots, which for graphics cards these days is pretty much the standard. This height as with most cards is due to the large heatsink needed to keep the core cool. The design of the cover is subtle and sleek with the HIS branding & slogan to the right, the AMD logo and card model to the left along with the intricately designed sword as featured on the retail box as we saw on the last page.

Centrally placed in the card is the 9 blade fan which draws air in and through the fins of the heatsink and out to the rear of the card via a grill. Looking past the fan, one of the huge copper heatpipes that draw the heat away from the core can be seen – this turns and winds around the fan housing.

On the rear of the card there are two DVI connections, one HDMI 1.4 connection and one display port. The top left quarter of the back plate is the grill through which heat is expelled from the card.

From looking at the base of the card, we can see the nice deep aqua coloured PCB and the cross plate which indicates where the GPU itself is situated on the board.

On the top of the card is a single CrossFire connection. This means that the card will only support 2-way CrossFire rather then 3 or 4-way. We can also see part of the slats in the side of the plastic cover that allow for air to flow through the heatsink.

On the base we can see the PCIe 2.1 connector, which is also backwards compatible with earlier versions of PCI-Express.

To the rear we see that there is one 6-pin PCI-E socket. This card can be a little power hungry and this is more noted by the fact that the original system requirement for a minimum of a 400W power supply had been increased to a minimum of 500W by means of an overlaying sticker on the box as mentioned before.