HIS Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card H785F2G2M

Pros: At the time I purchased it, it was the least expensive Radeon 7850 I could find. I needed one for my media PC and the price was right. It's a nice small card, and a bit smaller than the Radeon 6850 it replaced, and is a bit smaller than the GTX660 in my other Media PC. So it's a good sized card.

While the HSF is very basic, it does the job. The fan isn't loud and is a bit quieter than the 6850 it replaced.

I'm very happy to find a card in this price-range with 2GB of RAM. I was cross-shopping with Geforce GTX650 Ti w/Boost, and they performed close enough to each other that on board memory became the deciding factor. Most GTX650 Ti w/Boost! in this price range only offer 1GB of RAM, which pushed me to this card. I'm glad I did get this card as when I compared it to my GTX660 they ran pretty close to each other in overall performance and this card was quite a bit cheaper. On performance alone I recommend this card.

Cons: Not too many issues, I did find the HSF to be a little cheap. It's basically a piece of finned aluminum with a plastic shroud. As I said in my Pros, it does the job, however I found Overclocking limited. In comparison to my old HIS Radeon 6850(which had a copper heatpipe from the base to the aluminum fins) this is a really cheap solution. While Pitcarin runs a bit cooler than Barts, I wish I could get this to perform like a 7870 via overclocking (I was able to get my old HIS 6850 pretty close to 6870 levels).

Those aren't the reasons I knocked an egg. While I have not had an issue with HIS cards and never had to deal with an RMA, a friend of mine had his HIS 6850 go bad and I tried helping him RMA it but the process is very convoluted and confusing. We gave up. After having good RMA experiences with other vendors I found this disappointing. Just to re-iterate I've never had any issues with their cards, but I've had very easy times with Asus, MSI and EVGA cards if they went bad. It was about a year ago, so I'm unsure if HIS improved their RMA process, but I hope they did because I've had good experiences with their cards.

Overall Review: I have this card running with a Core i3 2120 and 8GB of RAM on a Micro-ATX EVGA P67 board. While my GTX 660 is tied to a Core i5 2500k and 16GB of RAM. Playing games across both machines I found them to perform very similarly to each other and considering the fact that it's an i3 vs an i5 it's impressive that this card tied to the weaker CPU performs very close to the GTX660. If the price is right when you look at this card don't hesitate to pull the trigger as chances are you'll likely not need to RMA it and it's the best bang for buck you can get (at least when I bought it).

Pros: Probably a decent card, when it works

Cons: Paid to get 2-day shipping on this card because I needed it fast and my BIOS refused to post once it arrived and was installed. Spent HOURS trying to troubleshoot it until I finally went over to my friend's house and tried it in two separate other working PC's, of which it wouldn't post on either of them. Safe to say this card was DOA. Not sure if this is a fluke or fault of the manufacture, but it seems I wasn't the only person who received a DOA card. Buyer's beware. Now I have to RMA it to newegg and wait another two weeks before I get a new card shipped to me and I can finally use it. Very disappointing.

Also worth pointing out is the stupid placement of the 6-pin power connecter. The connecter is placed directly under the plastic cover of the card which makes it very hard to detach the 6-pin power chord (since the latch gets covered by the plastic). Not really an issue if you just install it once and leave it your computer for awhile, but very annoying when you're troubleshooting and constantly switching GPU's.

Overall Review: I'm sure I just got unlucky and got a bad card, but I would still recommend anyone thinking about buying this to spend the extra $10-15 and get a quality brand like Sapphire, Visiontek or Diamond. The power connectors on those cards aren't placed without thought and the extra $10-15 is well worth the peace of mind, time and energy that you save knowing that you're getting a card from a quality brand.