ASUS EAH6850 DirectCu

The Asus EAH6850 DirectCu has the distinction of being one of the least expensive Radeon HD 6850 cards we've tested.

While the card’s PCB design and output ports (two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort) are similar to what is offered by the other cards here, the Asus features a custom cooler. Asus claims its cooling solution is 20% cooler than the generic Radeon HD 6850 cooler whether the GPU is under load or when it is idle.

Asus has also made it easy to overlock the EAH6850 DirectCu in terms of both frequency and voltage. This pairs well with the upgraded cooler, so if you’re keen on squeezing more performance out of your purchase, the EAH6850 is a sensible buy.

Running the card through our benchmarking gauntlet it returned very impressive benchmark results. At 1680 x 1050 pixels it managed 74fps, 55fps and 34.9fps in our H.A.W.X, World in Conflict and Heaven v2.0 tests. These figures were better than the numbers produced by the more expensive XFX Radeon HD 6850.
 
Dialling up the resolution to 1920 x 1200 pixels, the Asus spat out numbers of 67fps, 49fps and 31.2fps, which again made it faster than the more expensive XFX card. The reason the Asus manages such strong results is because its GPU runs at 790MHz by default, rather than the recommended 775MHz.