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HIS Radeon HD 5850 Review

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On October 9, 2009, 1:19 PM

Having just recently reviewed the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and bearing witness to its power, we were keen to get our hands on the cheaper, cut-down version known as the Radeon HD 5850. Though both cards were announced last September 23rd, AMD waited an extra week until the Radeon HD 5850 could be showcased. And now - admittedly a bit late - we have finally dug up a production model from HIS to put to the test.

The more affordable HD 5850 shares the same technological advances as its higher-end sibling. That includes support for DirectX 11, HDMI bitstreaming, Eyefinity, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, and supersample anti-aliasing. A slightly toned down configuration, however, allows it to sell for just $260.


At this price the Radeon HD 5850 is not much more expensive than the HD 4890 or Nvidia's GeForce GTX 275, and it is considerably cheaper than the GeForce GTX 285. It's also about $120 more affordable than the Radeon HD 5870, which currently holds the fastest single-GPU graphics card crown.

Read the complete review.

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User Comments: 30

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  1. It's crystal clear by now that AMD has managed to deliver the fastest and second-fastest single-GPU graphics cards money can buy over the past month.

    Have a re-read guest, this is a single GPU card VS the GTX 295 that is a dual GPU card (actually its two GTX 275's with a heat sink between them) but be that as it may, it beat the GTX 295 in a few games and came within 20% in most others. its the hands down winner for a single GPU card, and its not even the flagship.

  2. Staff

    Are you on crack? The GTX295 clearly won almost every test you threw at it. Why does your conclusion state that the 5850 wins everything? Did you just phone the conclusion in?

    Please don't embarrass the guest account, other people have to use it.

  3. When the time will come, I mean the card will be in stock without a problem, I will get my old GTX 260 out and put two of these babies in my P5Q Deluxe (Crossfire all the way). One card at a time, only to see how much heat it will generate and how much power it will draw.

    I love the curves of the HIS 5850 and overall aspect.

  4. this is a great card. the fan is really loud when you wind it up...my computer might take off from my desk

  5. I bought HIS HD 5850 iCooler V (plain, non-reference) card 2 weeks back and I am very happy with its performance. I have used XFX cards before both ATI and nVidia based and this is my first HIS card. I had never heard of this brand before so I was a little apprehensive in buying it at first, but the reviews on newegg led me to believe that it is the one I wanted, although it sounded a little overpriced to me.

    After almost 2-3 hours of intense gaming (Metro 2033 ish games) the card did NOT cross 65 degrees CELSIUS which in my book is great! just like those old smaller cards (my old XFX GeForce 6600GT used to run at this temperature!)

    Almost all the games today are fully playable with all settings maxed out at 1680x1050. 60% of games are playable at the 1900x1200 resolution with all settings maxed out. On a 22" screen, 1680x1050 is more than enough.

    The fan on the card also runs quiet and just fit in my mid-atx case but I had to move my hard disk up a couple of slots in that bay.

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