Card Layout and Photos
From the outside there isn’t anything that makes the R7850 stand apart from the R7870 other than the obvious name on the top. They went with the same cooler and PCB. Not that there is a problem with that. The fact is the Double Dissipation heatsink XFX is using is the best looking cooling solution on the market. These cards are dead sexy! The entire cooler is made out of aluminum and the black strip does a great job of accenting the raised and machined rings around the fans and the XFX logo in the middle.
Up top you have full view of the red strip across the card made out of aluminum. Not only is this perfect for a case modder to color to match his theme, but it’s also one of the only parts of the card you will see in most cases. Because of that its great to see that it looks better than the typical plastic shroud that we normally would see.
With power requirements even lower than the R7870, the R7850 still has the same two 6 pin connections. This may seem a little odd to those of you who have seen reference HD 7850’s as they only have a single 6 pin header. Like I said before the two cards look identical. The R7850 is running on a very similar or the same PCB as its bigger brother, something that the reference card did NOT do.
Such a sexy card
A peak at the back PCB. I love that they went with black as it matches the look with the Double Dissipation heatsink. But as you can see, this is much longer than a standard HD 7850 PCB also.
For the back PCI slots the R7850 has two DVI connections, one HDMI, and two mini display ports. It’s always nice to see the two DVI ports as some are starting to move over to one with an HDMI to DVI adapter. For ventilation the XFX logo is cut out and according to XFX this actually flows more than a stock vent.