XFX Radeon HD 7850 Double D 2GB Gaming Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,862 words · ~9 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at a video card that is a compelling value
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so I'm not even going to tell you guys what it is although if you want to cheat you could always look at the title of
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the video which you've probably already done because there's not a whole lot of
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Point watching a video unless you've already watched the title to find out if
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you're interested in it or not although you could tell that to all the people
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who watch the videos that I do about Apple stuff and then come in to dislike
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my video and you know make negative comments about about Apple and people
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who use iPhones and Linus but whatever I'm not sad or
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depressed because today we are not talking about Apple we are talking about
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a pretty sweet graphics card from XFX this is like I said before one of the
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best values out there it is the Radeon hd7850 and this particular one has a few
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things that are special about it it has 2 gigs of RAM which is okay not that not
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that special not that abnormal it also has
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their DD cooler which is to say that it
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has two fans for double the dissipation
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of one fan okay so it doesn't quite work out to
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half the temperatures but you will get significantly better temperatures and
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we've seen this time and time again versus a reference cooler so I I know
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I'm unboxing this really quickly but I actually just want to kind of have
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everything in front of me before I start to talk about it too much okay in terms
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of included accessories XFX gives you a crossfire Bridge that's your standard
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length Crossfire bridge if you need a bigger one it should come with your motherboard they give you a door hanger
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that says do not disturb I gaming so
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like screw off oh no it doesn't say that never mind no it's just a picture of like army dudes okay on the back they've
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got their part number their serial number as well as your personal
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activation code which is really cool because they give you this convenient
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neat piece of Swag to keep all the information that you need on in case you
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need to contact their customer service which is handy because the last thing
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you want to do when you're like diagnosing something is like stick your head inside your computer and try to
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read the serial number off the very bottom of the PCI Express lot so that's
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a much more convenient way to do that Pro Series power supply so they've got
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some other products from XFX that you might want to check out including their
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adapters and connectors and whatnots Hardware limited warranty okay region
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specific so you want to check online for the details however XFX has one of the
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best reputations in the biz in the entire graphics card business when it
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comes to warranty and customer support once again this is something that I've
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seen time and time again countless testimonials for XFX and the way that
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they do business so there you go there
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is the sexy graphics card with their ghost cooler and let's finish off seeing
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what XFX has to say for themselves about it more memory for high resolutions
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right this is good compared to other cards in this price range the 7850 has
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lots of memory why is that important someone messaged me on YouTube not that
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long ago asking if I could do benchmark of a GTX 550 TI in surround gaming mode
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I said no I'm not going to bother because the performance is going to be horrible cuz it doesn't have enough
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memory and honestly the GPU doesn't really have the horses either he's
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messages me back a little while later he says oh well I bought it and uh I
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benchmarked it and just so you know the performance is really horrible and I'm
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like I know um yes it is you need a more
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powerful graphics card you need more memory if you want to run High
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resolutions so there you go more details and better gaming yes all of this is
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true G thermal maximizes airf flow for exceptional venting throughout the card
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well let's have a look at that when we uh when we check out the cooler key
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features um wow that's no
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way mosquito noise reduction do they mean like coil
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lne do you think that's what they mean I mean I can tell you guys now that I've
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had pretty bad experiences overall with reference cards on the AMD side for coil
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line that is that noise that can come out of the back of the card when you
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play a game so you know what we're going to do before we finish this unboxing we're going to go plug this into
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something and let you guys know if this card wines so you guys will know for
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sure multim monitor difference yes all of this is true AMD does have the best
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multim monitor support when it comes to managing your desktops as well as
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configuring it Bar None okay next Generation architecture so this is you
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ah right this is using their new 28 nm uh family of processors so yes they're
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fast yes they run cool they are also full F capable of running 4K displays
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which is awesome and I personally am looking forward to 4K displays in a huge
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way this is interesting so they are calling their professional grade
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components durch which basically means solid caps F core chokes XFX bracket
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design and a dust-free ip5x
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fan neat check that out so they actually have a Blocker in there so remember guys
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dust free doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to get like dust and
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like Gunk buil up on your fence but what it means is the fan itself is sealed so
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you won't get dust inside it causing it to not work anymore which is way more
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important actually all right so the ghost cooler the idea of this is that
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they are throwing heat basically all over the card all over every part of it
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making sure that the entire card is adequately cooled because it's really
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easy to build a cooler that cools the GPU core itself really well but might
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not actually provide adequate cooling to other things that can cause instability
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when overclocking as well so you can see they've got
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a unisync across the almost the entire
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bottom of the card covering things like the RAM the vrms there you see going all
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the way to the back of the card and that is what's going to spread the heat
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around and make sure that it can be adequately cooled by these two double D
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fans that are on the top of the card blow well rather on the bottom of the
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card blowing up we also see that they've
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got is that really four heat pipes they claim four heat pipes but I don't see
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them oh wow they've got a really really tight stack there of 4 heat pipes that
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go right directly over the core and carry the heat as far away as this one
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over here goes all the way over here so you can see that the way XFX has laid
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out the heat pipes they are Distributing them as evenly as possible except where
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it's totally unnecessary so right directly over the core there aren't
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really any heat pipes going there because they're getting incidental air flow from both sides from these fans and
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heat will be transmitted directly up the aluminum fins from the core itself and
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then dissipated Away by these fans so the heat pipes are carrying heat here
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here here and here where it will then be
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sort of blown all out the bottom what's cool about this open bottom on the card
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is that it actually keeps the motherboard components from getting too hot hot running graphics cards can
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easily transmit heat even through conduction to your motherboard because
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they are physically connected so the motherboard right under the graphics
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card can often run extremely hot which can be stressful on the components if
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you have a video card that is actively cooling the motherboard from the fans
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all the time then that's better so there you go you have that now the
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disadvantage of a heat SN design like this is that it doesn't exhaust all the
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air out the back which can be good for cases that have poor air flow however if
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you have a case that has good air flow this will definitely give you better temperatures and better overclocking
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than a reference design cooler on the back we find two mini display ports an
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HDMI as well as two DVI ports and we've
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also got there's their XFX bracket giving you I guess a little bit more air
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flow than just the standard slit design but not a ton of air is going to be
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going out the back of the case with a design like this anyway this is a PCI
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Express 3.0 graphics card it also supports Crossfire so you can see we've
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got one crossfire finger on the back it is a power efficient card whether it's
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at idle or under gaming load however you still do need two PCIe six pin power
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connectors and like almost every XFX card I've ever seen it has a matte black
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PCB they were the ones who started this before the others and so they get credit
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for making like the best possible PCB
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configuration because matte black is awesome and every PCB should be matte
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black on the top we've got their branding elements so XFX r7850 with
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ghost thermal technology and they're Double D cooler they've also got you
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know more shiny XFX that's going on XFX really does build beautiful cards and I
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mean so they should they've been doing this for a while I think that pretty much wraps it up so it supports up to
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four displays up to 4K high resolution
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displays and it has the power Gusto and
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gaming horses to actually drive them remember guys
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not only surround gaming requires lots of memory high resolution also requires
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more memory so if you want to get a value card that's still going to at
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least be able to run it and not run out of memory at highres you will need
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something with at least two gigs something like this is probably a good bet don't forget to subscribe to lest
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