Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7850 hasn't shined as bright as some of the other HD 7000 series video cards we've looked at from AMD. We saw the HD 7870, HD 7950, HD 7970 really shine with some awesome numbers and great overclocking results, while the HD 7750 and HD 7770 were both priced too high in our opinion.

The HD 7850 kind of sat in the middle - its price to performance was better, but the overclocking potential we've seen from it hasn't been as great as some of the others. Overall, though, out of the box the performance was strong and it ultimately proves to be a very good model for people who are looking for something at this reasonable price point.

Today we're going to be looking at another HD 7850 with this one coming from Sapphire and carrying an overclock out of the box. We haven't looked at a HD 7850 from Sapphire and we wonder if this one will impress us or not. As always we've got to do a few things before we look at the performance of this particular card.

The first thing we're going to do is take a look at the box and see what kind of bundle Sapphire has been able to put together for us today. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card itself and take a closer look at what is exactly going on with the cooling and connectivity side of things.

From here we'll move onto the specifications where we'll look at what kind of overclock Sapphire is offering us out of the box before we move onto our testbed which will then lead us into the performance side of things. As just mentioned, though, let's see what's going on with the package here.

Package

Looking at the box we can see the overall design isn't too different to what we've seen before and you can see we're dealing with an Overclock Edition. Turning the box over goes into some detail on the features that are offered by the HD 7800 series.

Inside we've got a pretty nice package with an invitation to Sapphire Select Club or SSC, Quick Install Guide and driver CD to round out the normal additions.

We've also got a Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connector, HDMI to DVI, CrossFire Bridge, Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort and a full length HDMI cable to round off the bundle.