[Arclight]

Got a Gigabyte 460. Lovely cooler on there. Barely audible and hasn't gone past 65C on the heaviset load.

Though normally I'd advice Sapphire for Radeon. Don't think the 6850 would disapoint in any case: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/a...idrange-market

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Without the EVGA card in the picture though, the 6870 is clearly sitting at a sweet spot in terms of price, performance, and noise. It's faster than the 5850 while drawing only as much power and yet it's still slightly quieter. Meanwhile it completely clobbers the reference clocked GTX 460 1GB in gaming performance, although with NVIDIA's new prices and the $30 premium we would hope that this is the case. If nothing else the 6870 wins by default - NVIDIA doesn't have a real product to put against it.

As for the Radeon HD 6850 however, things are much more lopsided in AMD's favor. It's give and take depending on the benchmark, but ultimately it's just as fast as the GTX 460 1GB on average, even though it's officially $20 cheaper. And at the same time it draws less power and produces less noise than the GTX 460 1GB. In fact unless the GTX 460 1GB was cheaper than the 6850, we really can't come up with a reason to buy it. For all the advantage of an overclock when going up against the 6870, the stock clocked card has nothing on the 6850. Even the GTX 460 768MB, while $10-$20 cheaper than the 6850, still has to contend with the fact that the 6850 is almost 10% faster and only marginally louder.

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