The HD 6850 from AMD and its partners has been shown to deliver performance that falls just under the level of its older cousins the HD 58XX series for a nice price discount. The factory overclocked versions of the HD 6850 have been pouring out of the doors of AMD's partners. You have cards that look like reference cards with big clocks all the way up to cards that are complete redesigns of AMD's handiwork. That is what I have for you today in the form of the latest HD 6850 to roll out of ASUS's doors. The EAH6850 DirectCU. This card comes factory overclocked with speeds of 790Mhz on the core and 1000Mhz on the memory in a bid to compete with the latest factory overclocked GTX 460 cards from NVIDIA. The EAH6850 DirectCU gets its name from the enhanced cooling solution used to keep this card from overheating. Namely, a dual heat pipe cooler that utilizes Heatpipe Direct Contact technology to get the heat from the GPU into the heat sink assembly and dissipated into the airflow around the card as quickly as possible. This cooling solution is said to be 20% more efficient than the reference-based cooling solution. Hmm, equipped with better cooling and an improved build process - let's see how well the EAH6850 performs against the competition.