i can confirm their findings; temperature and noise gets through the roof once you hit 950mhz; i managed to push my card to 1050mhz core but it required 1.3v (Sapphire Trixx has a higher limit than afterburner) and ttemps with the fan @100% jumped from 60 to 80°C; if you set it to 90% you get an instant crash so 80°C is the limit when overclocking these cards...

it seems like 950mhz core is the sweet spot for 6850s as power consumption is still ok at this level and you're getting mem bandwidth limited even with 1150-1200 mem clock (my card does 1200 without artifacting; 1230 shows artifacts and 1240 causes a driver reload)

great review and i think that 6850 is a much better value than 6870 and slightly better than GTX460 especially with overclocks and a properly modded bios with 2D clocks