Now AMD with their AiB partners (Asus, Club3d, HIS, MSI, TUL/VTX3D and XFX) have announced an HD7850 model with 1GB of graphics memory brining a lower price and stonger competition to the table. The card is running  on a processor with 1024 stream processors ticking at 860MHz. The only real difference from the original HD7850 is half of the graphic memory size. The 1GB GDDR5 communicates over same 256 bit bus with a speed of 1200 MHz or 4.8GHz effectively. In this way AMD can offer a slightly smaller price and push competition even more.

The recommended retail price is $229, compared to $249 of the original version (2GB). With this price AMD is trying to get closer to NVIDIA’s GTX560 Ti and take away some of their market share in this price range. It is expected that gamers wont have bigger issues, having 1GB less graphic memory in mind, playing most of titles on high resolutions (1080p). It looks like this card will be really nice “bang for the buck“ for everyone that is not in a position to pay more money on a graphic card update.

Exact model names of the card for some AiB partners:

ASUS (ASUS HD7850-DC-1GD5)
Club 3D (Club 3D Radeon HD 7850 royalQueen)
HIS (HIS 7850 Fan 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMini DP)
MSI (MSI R7850-1GD5/OC)
TUL /VTX3D (VTX3D HD7850 1GB GDDR5, X-Edition)
XFX (XFX Radeon 1GB 7850 FX-785A-ZNFC)

[Ed – A reduction of $20 while losing 1GB of memory might not make this a hit with gaming enthusiasts. Instead it could be an more of  niche product where someone is looking to save a small amount of money becasue they do not need the extra graphics performance, but want the higher end GPU. We have seen this with a few reduced editions before from both AMD and nVidia. However, if AMD can drop the price under $200 and the perfromance is there it could have a serious impact on nVidia's sales in this segment of the market]

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