AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5850 Video Card Review @ [H]

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5850 Video Card Review - The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is launching today! Is is based on the same 5800 architecture as the HD 5870. We aim to find out how it compares to an HD 5870 in single GPU and 5850 CrossFireX configurations. The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is bringing with it an incredible PC gaming value.

Great, thanks!!

Daauuummmnnnn. Crossfire is getting way better at scaling.

Bah, shoulda firsted when I got the chance.

(of course, that'll probably just get my post deleted)

Great review.

Hey Brent, I don't know if Kyle took off yet, but I sent him http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...88&lid=1022061 Could this work for what you guys need?

Excellent review! Now I feel like doing 5850 Xfire, even thought I don't need that much power.

Also, I'm glad you added in that statement on nvidia... was getting tired of posts telling people to wait on a video card with no release date.

Great review

If you are waiting for NVIDIA to jump out of the GPU closet with a 5800 killer and put the fear into you for making a 5800 series purchase for Halloween, we suggest paper dragons are not that scary. We feel as though it will be mid-to-late Q1’10 before we see anything pop out of NVIDIA’s sleeve besides its arm. We are seeing rumors of a Q4’09 soft launch of next-gen parts, but no hardware till next year and NVIDIA has given us no reason to believe otherwise.

Nvidia isn't going to have anything ready until Jan at least? They are going to be losing a whole lot of holiday sales, even if they drop the prices on 285/295 (and they're going to have to...like yesterday.)

Kyle/Brent: could you comment on the noise level of the 5850 in comparison to the 5870 pls? Is the 5850 quieter than the 5870 or gtx 285?


Very decent performance. This card seems like it'll be a good overclocker and will have a great bang for the buck. Also happy to see that noise levels are low
Up here in canada, you are looking at around 450 for the 5870 or 300$ for the 5850. At that price, the 5850 seems to be a great value.

Tks for the great review [H]

Originally Posted by BravO)))

Hey Brent, I don't know if Kyle took off yet, but I sent him http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...88&lid=1022061 Could this work for what you guys need?

Got one on the way and will test it this weekend.

why on earth are you using that oldass hard drive?

Now if we can only find these in stock anywhere :/

seems like a good performer but the price isn't right for me.

Originally Posted by EnderW

why on earth are you using that oldass hard drive?

My test system hdd bit the dust before I started all the 5800 testing a couple of weeks ago, sadly I had to use an old spare I had, I have a WD Black Edition on the way to replace it.

Can we expect availability today/tomorrow or Friday?

Guru3D's review mentioned Friday. I'm hearing confusing information.

Originally Posted by Kyle_Bennett

Got one on the way and will test it this weekend.

Cool man. I didn't know if you left on your trip yet. Looking forward to hearing if it works. I would prefer to by two of the monitors of the one I have instead of having a mismatched one because of dp.

Originally Posted by xXxDieselxXx

Can we expect availability today/tomorrow or Friday?

Guru3D's review mentioned Friday. I'm hearing confusing information.

Let me get some direct answers for you on that.

Couldn't wait for this card. Was worried about power requirements. Perfect for my SFF


Great review as always Brent

Great review I will definately pick this up in the next 2mns for my new build. I had a question about the HDMI does the audio out work on it if you hook up to say a 720p LCD TV screen? I wanted to find out since it would mean I could finally replace my computer speakers.

Originally Posted by Brent_Justice

My test system hdd bit the dust before I started all the 5800 testing a couple of weeks ago, sadly I had to use an old spare I had, I have a WD Black Edition on the way to replace it.

curious as to if that would affect the results as I've seen the drive can affect minimum FPS

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/i...1933/17331.png
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=3403&p=14

Originally Posted by EnderW

curious as to if that would affect the results as I've seen the drive can affect minimum FPS

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/i...1933/17331.png
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=3403&p=14

I have used this Seagate HDD on all the testing in the 5870 and 5850 evaluation with each video card, the system setup is the same for all cards tested in both evaluations. And, with 6GB of RAM on the system, I highly doubt it is affecting gameplay performance. Also, we do not use benchmarks which is what was used in the linked tests above, we perform real-world run-throughs several times. The HDD was a non factor in my gaming, I did not witness hard drive thrashing or poor hdd performance slowing down gameplay.