Introduction

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The day we've been waiting for since the past couple of months has finally arrived. AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, is out with its second-generation DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.

The new architecture also refines and expands on the product's feature-set, giving the GPU an even bigger role to play in today's PC than simply rendering 3D graphics: that's accelerating smooth and crystal-clear high-definition video, and getting into CPU territory, by number-crunching for applications at a much more parallel scale than multicore processors.

The product also marks a fundamental shift in AMD's approach to the market. Until now, the HD x800 series (such as HD 3800 series, HD 4800 series, and HD 5800 series) is regarded as that class of SKUs that give you the highest single-GPU performance possible for the prevalent architecture. But now, AMD has restructured its nomenclature in a big way.

When it came to light that Barts, oversimplistically a successor to the Juniper GPU (which makes up the Radeon HD 5700 series), is going to be branded under the HD 6800 series, it created quite some drama; with some users claiming it to be very gimmicky of AMD to release a series that isn't much of an upgrade option for existing users of HD 5800 series GPUs. That's not the case, because AMD made it adequately public through the press, its reasoning behind using the HD 6800 series as the "gamer's sweet spot" series, and consolidating all higher-end SKUs into the Radeon HD 6900 series, slated for next month. Besides, it's not like AMD is asking Radeon HD 5800 series kind of prices for today's GPUs. The main design ideology behind the HD 6800 series, as AMD put it, is to give you Radeon HD 5800 series performance at sweet-spot prices.

The ASUS EAH6850 DirectCu we're reviewing today is ASUS' in-house design implementation that sports its DirectCu (direct copper) GPU cooler, which has quite some credentials, making it to many performance-segment graphics cards from the company. The PCB is ASUS' in house design, too, but borrows heavily from AMD's essential reference design. ASUS is also giving you a small core clock bump, up to 790 MHz from the AMD reference clock of 775 MHz.

Architecture

Barts, named after the Saint Barthélemy island in the Caribbean, is a performance-segment GPU. It is built on the 40 nm silicon fabrication process at TSMC, Taiwan. Since it is essentially a DirectX 11 generation GPU, most of the components are the same as on the Radeon HD 5000, albeit with a lot of restructuring. The SIMD processing area, like on the Cypress, is branched into two blocks, because there are way too many SIMD units. While Cypress had a single Ultra-Threaded Dispatch Processor component that semaphored instructions and data between the two clusters, with Barts, AMD gave each cluster its own dispatch processor, instruction and constant caches, thus increasing the parallelism. Each cluster holds 7 SIMD engines, with 80 stream processors, each. On the HD 6850, two of these SIMD engines are disabled, leaving us 960 stream processors. Coupled with engine clock speeds of 775 MHz, the computational power of Barts in its Radeon HD 6850 avatar, hence, is rated at 1.5 TFLOPS.

There are 48 texture units (TMUs) available on Radeon HD 6850. With a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, there are 32 raster operations processors (ROPs). AMD also addressed the one shortcoming of the Evergreen architecture which NVIDIA took advantage of: tessellation performance. Northern Islands GPUs carry a second generation tessellation unit that is both redesigned, and is backed by a new adaptive tessellation algorithm at the driver level. Together, up to 100% increase in tessellation performance is advertised by AMD.

A more detailed Architecture overview is available in our HD 6870 review.

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There is a redesigned video acceleration component, the 3rd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 3.0), which provides GPU acceleration for Blu-ray 3D and DivX high-definition video formats, and six display controllers offering six TMDS links. This lets users connect up to six displays to as independent display heads, or span display heads across multiple physical displays using the Eyefinity technology. The new HDMI 1.4a connector standard is made use of, which gives you support for stereoscopic 3D standards such as Blu-ray 3D, the two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors support Multi-Stream technology that let you daisy-chain 3 physical displays per connector, letting you wrap up a 6-display Eyefinity array using just those two connectors.

<table border="1" class="resulttable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<th></th>
<td>Radeon 
HD 5770</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 460</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 460</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 6850</td>
<td>ASUS 
HD 6850</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 5850</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 470</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 6870</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 5870</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 480</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 5970</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Shader units </th>
<td align="right">800</td>
<td align="right">336</td>
<td align="right">336</td>
<td align="right">960</td>
<td align="right">960</td>
<td align="right">1440</td>
<td align="right">448</td>
<td align="right">1120</td>
<td align="right">1600</td>
<td align="right">480</td>
<td align="right">2x 1600</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>ROPs</th>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">24</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">40</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">48</td>
<td align="right">2x 32</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>GPU</th>
<td align="right">Juniper</td>
<td align="right">GF104</td>
<td align="right">GF104</td>
<td align="right">Barts</td>
<td align="right">Barts</td>
<td align="right">Cypress</td>
<td align="right">GF100</td>
<td align="right">Barts</td>
<td align="right">Cypress</td>
<td align="right">GF100</td>
<td align="right">2x Cypress</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Transistors</th>
<td align="right">1040M</td>
<td align="right">1950M</td>
<td align="right">1950M</td>
<td align="right">1700M</td>
<td align="right">1700M</td>
<td align="right">2154M</td>
<td align="right">3200M</td>
<td align="right">1700M</td>
<td align="right">2154M</td>
<td align="right">3200M</td>
<td align="right">2x 2154M</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Size</th>
<td align="right">1024 MB </td>
<td align="right">768 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1280 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1536 MB</td>
<td align="right">2x 1024 MB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Bus Width </th>
<td align="right">128 bit </td>
<td align="right">192 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">320 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">384 bit </td>
<td align="right">2x 256 bit </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Core Clock</th>
<td align="right">850 MHz </td>
<td align="right">675 MHz </td>
<td align="right">675 MHz </td>
<td align="right">775 MHz </td>
<td align="right">790 MHz </td>
<td align="right">725 MHz </td>
<td align="right">607 MHz </td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">850 MHz </td>
<td align="right">700 MHz </td>
<td align="right">725 MHz </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Clock</th>
<td align="right">1200 MHz </td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz </td>
<td align="right">837 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1050 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1200 MHz </td>
<td align="right">924 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Price</th>
<td align="right">$140</td>
<td align="right">$160</td>
<td align="right">$200</td>
<td align="right">$180</td>
<td align="right">$180</td>
<td align="right">$260</td>
<td align="right">$260</td>
<td align="right">$240</td>
<td align="right">$360</td>
<td align="right">$450</td>
<td align="right">$580</td>
</tr>
</table>

Packaging

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ASUS uses a similar package design as we have seen on other Direct CU cards from the company. The most important product highlights can be found on the back, even though "Voltage Tweak 50% faster" seems a bit exxagerated.

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You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + Documentation
DVI adapter
CrossFire Bridge
PCI-Express power adapter

The Card

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The ASUS HD 6850 DirectCU is clearly recognizable by the Direct CU thermal solution that we have seen on several NVIDIA and ATI based cards from ASUS before.

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Like all other HD 6850 cards released today, the ASUS HD 6850 Direct CU requires two slots in your system.

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The card has two DVI ports, one DisplayPort and one HDMI port. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.

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You may combine up to two HD 6850 and HD 6870 cards in CrossFire for higher performance or improved image quality settings.

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Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

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In terms of cooling there are no surprises with ASUS' Direct CU cooler. It uses two heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface and transport heat away quickly from the hot graphics processor to a fin heatsink where heat is dissipated in the fan's airflow.
The voltage regulator circuitry is cooled by a simple metal heatsink.

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A single 6-pin power connetor is required, even though it seems that ASUS has left an option to use a second 6-pin connector for more powerful designs.

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The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).

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The HD 6800 Series is the first product where we see the use of CHiL's CHL8214 voltage regulator. It supports voltage control via I2C and comes with extensive monitoring and tweaking features.

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AMD's new Barts graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 1.7 billion transistors on a die area of 255 mm². This is also the first GPU to carry the AMD logo instead of the ATI logo.

Test System

<table border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" class="ramtable" width="450">
<tr align="center">
<th colspan="2" scope="row" style="font-size:larger;text-align:center">Test System - VGA Rev. 10</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th width="120" scope="row">CPU:</th>
<td scope="row">Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Motherboard:</th>
<td scope="row">Gigabyte X58 Extreme 
Intel X58 & ICH10R</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Memory:</th>
<td scope="row">3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 
@ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Harddisk:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">WD Caviar Black 6401AALS 640 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Power Supply:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">akasa 1200W</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Software:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">Windows 7 64-bit</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Drivers:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">NVIDIA: 258.96 ATI: Catalyst 10.7 HD 6800: Catalyst 10.10 Oct 12</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Display:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">
LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600 <img src="http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/Radeon_HD_6850_Direct_Cu/images/zotac.jpg" width="120" height="40"></td>
</tr>
</table>
Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Aliens vs. Predator

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Aliens vs. Predator is based on a merger of the Aliens and the Predators franchise: two legendary alien species that are in conflict with each other, fighting to the death with human marines caught in between. The first person shooter game was developed by Rebellion Studios, who also developed the first AVP PC title and released in February 2010. It was one of the first DirectX 11 games with support for new features like Tesselation, which is why AMD heavily promoted it at the time of their DX 11 card launches. We used the AVP benchmark utility with tesselation and advanced DX11 shadows enabled.

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2, released in March 2010 by Electronics Arts, is the most successful DirectX 11 title so far. Even though it contains a full single-player campaign during which the player has to work with a squad to secure a secret weapon, the game is most well known for its fast paced, exciting multiplayer squad action. Thanks to a CPU-based Havok physics engine and skillful use of scripting, the game has destroyable objects, vegetation and terrain without requiring NVIDIA PhysX.
We tested the truck chase scene of the second single-player mission at maximum settings with DirectX 11 enabled.

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BattleForge

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BattleForge, a card based RTS, is developed by the German EA Phenomic Studio. A few months after launch the game was transformed into a Play 4 Free branded game. That move and the fact that it was included as game bundle with a large number of ATI cards made it one of the more well known RTS games of 2009. You as a player assemble your deck before game to select the units that will be available. Your choice can be from forces of Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow to complement each other.
The BattleForge engine has full support for DX 9, DX 10 and DX 10.1, we used the internal benchmark tool in DirectX 11 mode to acquire our results.

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Call of Duty 4

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Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter that is built on the award winning Call of Duty Series. It is the first version to play in modern times. In a near-future conflict between the United States, Europe and Russia you get to play as a United States Marine and a British SAS operative. The engine is Infinity Ward's own creation and has true dynamic lighting, depth of field, dynamic shadows and HDR. Even though the game plot is scripted you will find yourself in intense battles, often working together with computer controlled team mates.

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Call of Juarez 2

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Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood is a prequel to the first Call of Juarez game which was one of the first DX10 titles available on the market. This time the plot evolves around two brothers, before each mission you may pick one to play. Your choices affect the game play since both characters have different ways of handling situations and doing combat.
Call of Juarez 2 uses Techland's Chrome Engine 4 which adds Edge Anti Aliasing as one of the first engines on the market. Edge Anti Aliasing looks similar to normal AA but comes with a considerably reduced performance drop. However, due to the deferred shading design of Edge AA, normal AA can't be used on top of it.

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Crysis

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After the tremendous success of Far Cry, the German game studio Crytek released their latest shooter Crysis in 2007. The game was by far the most hyped and anticipated game in 2007, the forums were full of "Can my system run Crysis?" threads because of the high hardware requirements of this game. Just like in Far Cry the plot evolves on a small island with a thick and richly detailed jungle world. A lot of attention has been given to small details like correct physics. For example when you fire on a tree trunk, it will shatter and the tree will fall over leaving a stump behind. Enemies in a car can be stopped by shooting the tire of the car. The game graphics are by far the best ever seen in a PC game so far, yet the game still runs well on most computers.

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II by Relic Entertainment is an RTS game based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Unlike other Dawn of War titles there is no base-building element in the game, you simply command units on the battlefield. Due to the non-linear mission design, the choices which mission and objective you pick to pursue have considerable impact on game play and mission difficulty. A "hero" unit concept adds RPG elements to the game, allowing you to advance the unit in terms of levels and abilities. Dawn of War 2 uses the Essence Engine 2.0, version 1.0 was used in the Company of Heroes Series.

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DiRT 2

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DiRT 2 is the first game to offer basic DirectX 11 features, even though they are very limited, the title has been used extensively by AMD to market their DX11 products. The game features a large number of different racing events all over the world with tracks ranging from off-road, over stadiums to complex city courses. We chose not to benchmark DX 11 at this time because the number of DX11 effects is not worth the performance hit.

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Far Cry 2

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Four years after the success of Far Cry, Ubisoft has published the sequel called Far Cry 2. While the first part was set on an island, Far Cry 2 takes you deep into Africa with game play that resembles Grand Theft Auto much more than the original Far Cry, which was a classical 3D shooter. Ubisoft engineered a completely new 3D engine called "Dunia" which offers a large amount of popular features like DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 support, destructible environments, physics and non-scripted AI while not being as much of a resource hog as Crytek's CryEngine. We tested the Ranch Medium level at DirectX 10 with highest details.

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Tom Clancy's HAWX

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Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. is one of the very few recent flight simulator games on the market. Being a console conversion it emphasizes "flight" more than "simulator". It is set in a near future in which private military companies have begun fighting conflicts for nations with their own military gear. You are playing an elite pilot who was recruited by such a private company. During the game you get to fly over 50 different aircrafts, ranging from the MIG 21 to the mighty F22 Raptor. One notable feature of its engine is the use of GeoEye satellite imagery for terrain generation which offers one of the most realistic incarnations of battlefield terrain available today.

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Metro 2033

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Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game that is set in a post apocalyptic Moscow - as the name suggests inside the metro system. You will fight mutants or other humans who like to take away your shelter. The game has many gameplay elements similar to STALKER, also the engine has similar features. This is because two STALKER engine programmers left GSC Game World and started their own company which is now making Metro 2033.
The engine has support for all the latest eye candy like DirectX 11 and Tesselation. Unfortunately it leaves a less than optimized impression, making it a candidate to surpass Crysis for the highest hardware requirements. We tested in DirectX 11 mode with details set to "Very High". Please note that most cards will run out of memory at a resolution of 2560x1600 which results in the low scores you see all across the board.

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a first person shooter game set in a far future. You are Riddick, a notorious space criminal played by Vin Diesel in the movies. Dark Athena continues where Escape from Butcher Bay ended. A major aspect of the game is its tactical use of shadows and stealth so that enemies can't detect you. Vin Diesel's voice acting also adds greatly to the game experience.
The 0.0 FPS scores for NVIDIA cards at 2560x1600 are caused by driver crashes which seem to be related to card with 512 MB memory and below. Since it works fine on ATI this is not a game problem but an NVIDIA driver issue.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

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STALKER Clear Sky is GSC Gameworld's prequel to the 2007 hit "STALKER". Just like in the first part the game is set around the Russian area of Chernobyl and Pripyat, most well known for the nuclear accident that occurred there. You play the role of a mercenary who spends his days in The Zone trying to make a living. The Zone is an area which is affected by so-called anomalies which cause mutants to appear and laws of physics to change. While you investigate these anomalies the plot leads up to the events that happened right before the first game starts. A new in-game faction system encourages you to befriend various groups in The Zone in exchange for information or items. While the graphics of Clear Sky are based on the first Stalker game engine, there are numerous improvements, including support for DirectX10 and depth-of-field/volumetric effects. The 0.0 FPS scores for NVIDIA cards at 2560x1600 are caused by driver crashes which seem to be related to card with 512 MB memory and below. Since it works fine on ATI this is not a game problem but an NVIDIA driver issue.

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Supreme Commander 2

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Supreme Commander 2 is a real-time strategy game by Gas Powered Games who also designed the first part of the series which features epic battles between hundreds of units. Compared to the second part the number of different units and buildings has been reduced, as well as changes to the tech tree and a general reduction of map size.
Even though the engine is DirectX 9, it features state of the art global illumination and handles even large numbers of objects and effects with decent speed.

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Unreal Tournament 3

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The fourth game in Epic's highly successful Unreal Tournament Series is simply called Unreal Tournament 3. It is based on the Unreal 3 engine which is a major step forward from the previous engine. The game principle is centered about an arena style gameplay where several contestants try to reach a certain kill count or capture a flag for example. For its time, the graphics were top notch, with large and detailed textures. Unreal Tournament 3 is an important benchmark because its engine has been used in a large number of other titles, and there are even some in development using it. One major drawback of the way the engine is designed is that there is no support for Anti-Aliasing.

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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

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World of Warcraft is the most successful massively multiplayer online game in the world with far over 12 milion monthly subscribers. The game is centered around the epic battle between the Horde and Alliance factions with many other races getting involved in a long and complex story line. Even though it has been released in 2004, Blizzard has always added incremental improvements to the graphics, especially with new expansions. One key success of World of Warcraft is that it will run on a large number of slower systems, but also delivers a decent graphics experience on high-end systems. We tested in DirectX 11 mode with details set to "Ultra".

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3DMark03

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Futuremark Corporation is the number one player in the world of synthetic benchmarking. The 3DMark series is the most popular test suite for video card testing and is used by gamers, overclockers and manufacturers alike to determine how fast their hardware is. Even though it is a few years old, 3DMark03 can easily stress today's video cards.

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3DMark05

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Another benchmark from Futuremark is 3DMark05 which comes with four completely new game tests that make massive use of shaders and lighting effects. 3DMark05 is a great test for modern video card architectures - in some tests you are often close to the 30 fps mark, below which your games will feel sluggish.

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3DMark06

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Even though it's based on Futuremark's 3DMark05, the new 3DMark06 adds new tests for Shader Model 3.0 and HDR rendering. It is also the first 3DMark to incorporate a CPU score into the final 3DMark score. All tests have received an overhaul, for example in the Canyon Flight test you can now see beautiful sun glare effects with the help of High Dynamic Range rendering.

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Unigine Heaven 2.0

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Unigine Heaven was one of the first demos that supported DirectX 11. Heaven is a technology demonstration for Unigine engine which supports DirectX 9 through 11 and OpenGL too. Version 2.0 adds more scenes and optionally more complex tesselation features. While there is some controversy surrounding the benchmark whether it is an accurate representation of what to expect from future games in regards to DirectX 11 we still chose it as test to get an insight into potential future gaming.

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Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

For this test we measure power consumption of only the graphics card, via PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot. A Keithley Integra 2700 with 6.5 digits is used for all measurements. Again, the values here reflect card only power consumption measured at DC VGA card inputs, not the whole system.

We chose 3DMark03 Nature as a standard test representing typical 3D usage because it offers: - very high power draw - high repeatability - is a standard benchmark that is supported by all cards - drivers are actively tested and optimized for it - supports all multi-GPU configurations - easy to obtain - fairly compact in size - test runs a constant duration and renders a non-static scene with variable complexity just like any normal game.

The four result values are as following:

Idle: Windows Vista Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle until power draw is stable.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. Highest single reading during the test.
Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high non-game power consumption that can typically be reached only with stress testing applications. Card left running stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.
Blu-ray Playback: Power DVD 9 Ultra is used at a resolution of 1920x1200 to play back the Batman: The Dark Knight disc with GPU acceleration turned on. Playback starts around timecode 1:19 which has the highest data rates on the BD with up to 40 Mb/s. Playback left running until power draw converged to a stable value.

AMD has again managed to reduce power consumption with their latest generation of GPUs. This results in leading performance per Watt numbers. The card does exeedingly well in all scenarios with the exception of Blu-ray where I see some additional potential for power savings.

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Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

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The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

Idle fan noise on the ASUS HD 6850 Direct CU is OK, the limitation here seems to be the motor in the fan which can not run slower than 1500 RPM. Under load the card does not manage to be quieter than the HD 5850, so this seems to be a step in the wrong direction.

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Performance Summary

To create this graph we took all performance results of the five resolutions we tested, threw them together and calculated the relative performance of each card, compared to our review sample. In a sixth graph we also combined all tests in all resolutions to calculate the total relative performance of the review sample. Cards that do not support DX11 were given a score according to their performance in all other non-DX11 tests, which means cards were not penalized for not having DirectX 11 support.

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Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results.

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Performance per Dollar

If you are looking for the best bang for the buck, then you will love this graph. We looked up the current USD price of each card on the popular online shop Newegg and used it and the relative performance numbers to calculate the Performance per Dollar Index.

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Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed in this section were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.

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The overclocks of our card are 945 MHz core (20% overclock) and 1165 MHz Memory (17% overclock). Both overclocks are phenomenal and show that AMD has mastered the 40 nm production process. Such an overclocking potential enables willing users to buy the cheaper HD 6850 and overclock it to HD 6870 performance levels.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

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The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 16.2%.

Temperatures

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Temperatures are low across the board, I would have preferred to see slightly higher temperatures in return for less fan noise.

Voltage Tuning

New section. Please comment how you like it.

It has been a long known fact that overclocking headroom increases as soon as you increase the operating voltage. Until recently, software voltage control on VGA cards has been the exception and most users were not willing to risk their warranty by performing a soldering voltmod. Nowadays almost all current graphics cards have voltage control in order to achieve low power consumption by lowering voltage when in idle or slightly loaded.
In this section we will increase the GPU operating voltage step by step and record the maximum clock speed possible. Voltage is listed as the value that the voltage regulator reports via software, not actual measured voltage. The card was installed in-case, with fan settings at the default, memory will not be overclocked either. If a card has thermal throttling we will reduce the operating frequency to keep performance at maximum for a given voltage. Please note that the fan profile will have an effect on observed temperatures: if the card gets hotter the fan will ramp up to reduce temperatures or keep them from rising fast.

The following graph shows the overclocking potential we saw on our sample. GPU clock is represented by the blue line, which uses the vertical clock scale on the left. The scale starts at the default clock to give a feel for the overclocking potential over the base clock. Temperature is plotted in red using the °C scale on the right side of the graph.

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The card gains nicely with voltage increases, but once we set a voltage beyond 1.4V the voltage regulator circuitry would run too hot and the card would throttle down. In order to still reach maximum performance we had to reduce clock speed until the throttling stopped.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.
The following table lists the clock settings for major performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that we measured. We measure on the pins of a coil or capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.

<table border="1" class="resulttable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<th></th>
<td>Core 
Clock</td>
<td>Memory 
Clock</td>
<td>GPU Voltage 
(measured)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Desktop</th>
<td align="right">100 MHz</td>
<td align="right">300 MHz</td>
<td align="right">0.98 V</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Blu-ray Playback</th>
<td align="right">300 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1.12 V</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>3D Load</th>
<td align="right">790 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1.15 V</td>
</tr>
</table>

<table border="1" class="resulttable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<th colspan="2">CCC Overdrive Limits</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Core</td>
<td>1000 MHz</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Memory</td>
<td>1250 MHz</td>
</tr>
</table>

Value and Conclusion

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<td>

According to AMD, the Radeon HD 6850 will retail for $179.

</td>
</tr><tr>
<th>http://www.techpowerup.com/images/thumbup.gif</th>
<td>

Nice performance increase in this price segment
Great price/performance
Good overclocking potential
Overclocked out of the box
Improvement in performance per Watt
Low power consumption
Native full-size HDMI output
GDDR5 memory
HDMI 1.4 & DisplayPort 1.2 support
EyeFinity support - up to 6 displays with one card
Support for DirectX 11

</td>
</tr>
<tr>
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<td>

High Blu-ray power consumption
Lack of 3-way and 4-way CrossFire support
Fan not as quiet as it could be
Overclock out of the box very small
CCC Overdrive limits might be too low
DirectX 11 relevance very limited at this time
No support for CUDA / PhysX

</td></tr>
<tr><th>9.5</th>
<td>The ASUS Radeon HD 6850 shatters the DirectX 11 affordability barrier being priced at a mere $179. Never before has high-resolution full-detail gaming be available for so little money. Thanks to AMD's aggressive pricing, NVIDIA has also announced price drops on their own, and there's probably more to come. 
AMD's architectural improvements in the HD 6800 Series have not been to the core architecture but adress weak spots like the tesselation engine. Another field of advancement is the display output logic which has been expanded on again, giving AMD even more margin against NVIDIA here. Support for DisplayPort 1.2 allows up to six displays connected to a single card and enables daisy chaining and hub functionality for easier monitor hook up. HDMI 1.4 includes support for Blu-ray 3D titles which seems to be more of a features list bullet point than a real need-to-have feature at this time. 
AMD also managed to reduce power consumption even further, boosting performance per Watt some more. Unfortunately Blu-ray power consumption has been missed in these optimizations which results in a power consumption increase vs. the HD 5000 Series in that scenario. In terms of fan noise the ASUS HD 6850 comes at roughly the same noise level as the HD 5850 - actually a bit more. This is surprising considering the improvements in power consumption and suggest that engineering focus has been lacking here. 
We have seen outstanding overclocking potential on the ASUS HD 6850 Direct CU. Basically the card overclocks to HD 6870 performance levels without any increase in fan speed or voltage. If you are willing to push some more juice through your card you can even go well beyond 1000 MHz. Overall very impressive. 
If you are looking for the best price/performance in the sub $200 segment then the choice will be between the HD 6850 and the GTX 460 768 MB. Both cards overclock very well, the most notably difference being CUDA/PhysX support on the GTX 460 and vastly more display output options on the HD 6850. The difference between 768 MB and 1 GB makes no significant difference in most games. At this point it probably comes down to brand preference - or future price cuts.</td></tr>
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</table>