Introduction

A couple of months ago AMD launched the Radeon 7970 with the new CGN architecture. For a bit of time the 7970 was the only card to get with the new architecture and we were forced to wait while the lower end cards were prepared for the market.

Well, recently the 7800 series cards made their way to the market with the same architecture that is found on the top of the line 7900 cards.

While the 7800 cards use the same architecture they are not the same pure performers. They are pretty much top of the line cards with a few features cut off here and there. Its like buying a car with the smaller engine option.

You don't get that big V12 but you do get the V8 that puts out tons of power for its size.

HIS has been nice enough to send one of their 7850 cards for us to review. Recently I took a look at the 7750 and found it to be great for the amount of power it uses.

If that was any indication for a performance/wattage ratio to look after, this thing should be an absolute monster in terms of performance to power useage.

The Radeon 7850 supports tons of cool features such as DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1, DirectCompute 11, Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling,UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator,AMD HD3D technology,DisplayPort 1.2,HDMI 1.4a,Dual-link DVI with HDCP,VGA, and many other features.

We'll be testing the HIS Radeon 7850  on the socket 2011 test rig, which consist of the following  Intel Core i7 - 3930K @ 3.5ghz (LGA 2011), Asus Rampage 4 Extreme motherboard, 4x2gb of Corsair Dominator GT memory, Custom water loop cooler and an Antec 1200w Quattro power supply.

Enough of all the pleasantries, and lets get down to business!

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