Radeon HD 7850 

First, it needs to create a sizable performance jump, over the previous-generation Radeon HD 6800 series; second, its new chip has to prove Graphics CoreNext as being a viable investment for AMD by meeting some basic cost/performance, performance/die-area, and performance/Watt figures.

You may combine up to two HD 7850 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings.

You may combine up to two HD 7850/HD7870 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings.

You may recollect AMD's Radeon HD 6870 shipping for $240 on launch, and the HD 6850 for $180, both very attractive prices.

So there you have it, right now there's a good choice at almost every price point, and we haven't seen what NVIDIA's Kepler GK104 can do!

The price premium over the reference design is reasonable with $20.

This configuration is good for up to 150 W of power draw.

Getting rid of 1 GB of VRAM helped PowerColor keep the price of their card down while also reducing power consumption a bit, which takes some stress off the passive cooler.

Once we reach $330, GTX 570 becomes a rock-solid choice, unless you are willing to dish out $20 more for AMD's Radeon HD 7870 which does offer much better power consumption than the NVIDIA card.

That move and the fact that it was included as game bundle with a large number of ATI cards made it one of the more well-known RTS games of 2009.

The PowerColor HD 7850 SCS3 is your best choice if you absolutely must have a completely noiseless gaming experience, though.

As a result, performance almost matches that of the HD 7850 reference design, with the exception of 2560x1600 gaming.

Unlike the 2 GB found on the reference design and on most other HD 7850 cards, the Royal Queen uses just 1 GB of GDDR5 memory.

During gaming we see a slight increase that is justified by the higher clock speeds.

The memory chips are covered by small metal heatsinks, and two small heatsinks sit on the VRM circuitry.