In review: AFOX HD 7850 – nimble Radeon flatscreen in single-slot design | Retro 11 years ago

1 - Einführung und Übersicht 2 - Teardown: Das Kühlsusystem und die Platine 3 - Testsystem und synthetische Benchmarks 4 - Benchmarks: Spiele DirectX 9 5 - Benchmarks: Spiele DirectX 11 6 - Temperatur, Leistungsaufnahme, Lautstärke 7 - Video-Check: Lautstärke im Vergleich 8 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

Of course, we still remember the Radeon HD 6850, which was also slimmed down by AFOX. This time, the diet hits the new Radeon HD 7850, a card that virtually offers itself in terms of performance and waste heat. The first sample of this new card contained a rather unusual surprise, which we already presented in detail last week in the article “AMD’s Pitcairn with 768 SPs in the test: The chip, which unfortunately was never allowed to exist as Radeon HD 7830” and which also stirred up a lot of dust. So now the real card, which will also go on sale in this form. In order to get a proper impression of this extremely flat card, we also relied on videos this time and acoustically evaluated the different load conditions of the card.

Since AFOX has already contacted distributors in Germany, you can be confident that you will be able to purchase this somewhat exotic solution without having to import it yourself in the foreseeable future, even though there are now sources of supply in the Netherlands and the UK. Reason enough for us to take a closer look at this card. Single-slot solutions unfortunately have the reputation of not being the quietest card solutions – we’ll find out if this assessment still holds true, or if the new graphics card generation can perhaps even deliver contrary results due to the reduced consumption.

Packaging and scope of delivery

Sex sells – that’s probably what AFOX thought, when they used a newly designed packaging for the first time this year, which follows the general trend and now also uses its own female fantasy figure. This result is definitely better than the sausage-like plastic bride from Lucidlogix.

What we liked inside the package, as with Sapphire, was the lack of injection molded plastic. Except for the blister foil and a soft foam insert, the outer packaging is made entirely of cardboard and is thus also easily recyclable. A small manual and an inserted driver CD belong to the accessories.

If we look at the present technical data, then the surprise is missing this time. The Tahiti Pro chip’s full shader expansion with 1024 shader units lets us expect the usual results, especially since all clock rates correspond to AMD’s reference model. Of course, the unusual cooling remains as a unique selling point.

Let’s take another look at the comparable cards:

*) please note that this is not a final GPU

Card views

A single-slot design is always something special in this performance class. Reason enough to take a closer look at the review sample. The flounder look is quite appealing for many a spatially very limited system and often enough the only possible solution. Unfortunately, representatives with this small hip circumference have become very rare. The board on the other hand is a normal standard solution, whose layout does not hold any big secrets.

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