Introduction

To be honest, I'm not sure why it took me so long to get around to testing the HD 6850 in Crossfire. Yes, while I had tested it already, the problem was that the initial article was done with two 1120 Shader cards, which as we discovered later had just completely thrown out our results.

Combined with other products that came in and the normal rush before the holiday season begins, it's been a crazy month and then some. Today, though, I've finally paired up a pair of HD 6850s which both carry 960 Shaders. We'll see how performance looks and we'll then get the right results into our TPR graphs.

We're using the HIS HD 6850 today which we've already looked at previously, so we won't go into any real detail on what it comes with in that. If you want to see what comes in the package, I suggest checking out the HIS HD 6850 1GB Review. Just note that the performance in that review is based on the 1120 Shader version. If you want to see how it will perform in single card mode, you'll be able to see it in our graphs today.

Anyway, we'll just have a quick look at the specifications of the cards we're using today before we get stuck into the testbed we'll be using and more importantly, the performance we're able to achieve out of two HD 6850s in Crossfire.

Specifications

While there's no "reference" design as such for the HD 6850 due to the fact that the AIB is designing the card, there are reference clocks and that's exactly what the cards we're using today have.

That means our core clock is 775MHz while 1GB of GDDR5 comes in at a nice round sounding 4000MHz QDR. The only other thing to really take out of the GPU-Z screen shot above is the fact that Crossfire is indeed enabled.