Lesson one for the trainee PC performance enthusiast. Whether it's CPUs or GPUs, always go for a cut-down version of a flagship chip if you want to maximise your bang-for-buck ratio.Enter, therefore, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5850 graphics chipset....
The card at a glance For our tests, HIS sent us their Radeon HD 5850 H585F1GDG. It's not really an original card, since it uses ATI’s stock design. It's the same size and has the same cooler and clocks as a standard Radeon HD 5850. But...
Widely overlooked and quite often unavailable in retail at launch, the less powerful Radeon 5800 series card, the HD 5850 showed us today that it is no pushover. Despite sporting fewer stream processors and markedly lower clock speeds than the HD...
Final thoughts We surmised on the Radeon HD 5870 card's credentials in last week's review, and much of that in-depth analysis is pertinent to the DX11-compliant Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB card.The two high-end boards are seemingly analogous to the...
Putting together these value comparisons is harder than it looks. Oh, sure, looking at our overall value graphs and making broad generalizations is a lot of fun, but it can be quite misleading. You've gotta keep the hidden variables in mind. If this...
So what conclusion can be drawn from todays testing?Firstly I'm sure a lot of you have come into todays review with a preconceived notion of exactly what card you'd like. In previous times the general consensus was to purchase the highest priced...
Two HD 5850s are definitely better than a single card in almost every game. To take advantage of two cards of this magnitude you almost have to turn up FSAA to 8x and AF to 16x as performance with 4x FSAA is nearly CPU limited on a Core i7 920....
Summing up today’s test session, we have to admit that the Radeon HD 5850 is going to be the only real opponent to the Radeon HD 5870 until the arrival of the next generation of graphics cards from Nvidia. In fact, it is such a dangerous opponent that...
Pros:
Cons: