AFOX Radeon HD 6850 Low Profile Review – World exclusive review 11 years ago | Retro

1 - Intro, Overview and Specs 2 - Teardown and Details 3 - Optimizing the cooler: new fans 4 - Noise and Temperatures before and after 5 - Power Consumption 6 - Benchmarks and Conclusion

Curiosity and gradual dismantling

The card itself is in the form of the cooler cover in Afox’s own bright red metallic. The blue PCB doesn’t quite match the red in color, but let’s not be too petty.

You can already see two small, high-speed axial fans at first glance, which might raise first doubts about the possible HTPC suitability.

But prejudices do not count, we will measure this accurately later.

The actual cooler is made of pure aluminum; you won’t find a copper plate or embedded heat pipes. The large fin spacing just screams for fan speeds and pressure, and you don’t have to turn on the card to suspect that the heat exchange here is solved by powerful fan performance.

Detail shots from the teardown

The PCB looks very tidy, but the number and arrangement of the memory modules seems strange. In addition, there are three phases for the GPU and one for the memory – all discrete with very cheap MOSFETs and two larger ones for the low side and one for the high side per phase. Well, what’s not on it can’t be broken.

The cooling of the active components is solved reasonably well with an aluminum block and adhesive pad, but it’s not optimal either. We completely removed the adhesive pad during the subsequent conversion and thermally bonded the individual components using nano paste. A solution that requires a bit of tact, but also scores plus points.

Original paste of the manufacturer. Nothing against industrial mass production, but less is often more.

We have therefore first of all freed the chip from the gloop:

For the subsequent assembly, we used the rather tough Antec Nano 7, which requires experience when applying, but does not harden and become brittle as quickly, as it was designed for very high continuous temperatures.