AMD Radeon HD 5850 1GB Reviews

Wed 2009-09-30 - Posted by Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

HotHardware, Legit Reviews, and PC Perspective have posted the very first reviews of the highly anticipated AMD Radeon HD 5850 1GB graphics card, which is effectively a lightly cut-down version of the supremely powerful new Radeon HD 5870.

Let's see what they had to say:

HotHardware: AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 Performance Review:

"After running the Radeon HD 5850 through an assortment of tests, a distinct trend emerged. Save for a few instances (namely in 3DMark Vantage and L4D), the Radeon HD 5850 performed right on par with or just ahead of the GeForce GTX 285. The Radeon HD 5850 was also significantly faster than the Radeon HD 4890, but it trailed the more powerful and more expensive cards, like the Radeon HD 4870 X2, GeForce GTX 295, and of course the Radeon HD 5870."

Click here to read the full review.
Legit Reviews: ATI Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire Video Card Review:

"When it comes to the performance of the Radeon HD 5850 we found it to be 15-25% slower than the Radeon HD 5870 in the vast majority of the benchmarks. It was also faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 graphics card, which is currently NVIDIA's flagship single GPU video card! If we had to suggest a screen resolution size to go with the Radeon HD 5850 it would have to be 1680 x 1050 and under if you like to turn all the eye candy on. Sure, the majority of the benchmarks that we ran here today showed that the Radeon HD 5850 was able to run above 60FPS at 1920 x 1200 with 8xAA enabled, but we would like to plan for the future."

Click here to read the full review.
PC Perspective: AMD Radeon HD 5850 1GB Review - Cyprus gets a bit cheaper:

"And that was AMD’s design from the outset – to make a card that performs great with DX9/DX10 titles today but has a feature set that helps it to stand out from the NVIDIA monster and gain not only performance crowns but consumer hearts. The new Radeon HD 5850 is definitely the best card you can get in the $250 price range today and I think is my best overall pick for all gamers. Even if you are running a 2560x1600 display or plan on using 3 monitors for gaming then I think a pair of these cards will be your best bet, once AMD has gotten its act together and enabled CrossFire for Eyefinity (or once Lucid’s HYDRA technology is released)."

Click here to read the full review.

The Radeon HD 5850 is as good as we all hoped, since it's only 15-25% slower than the HD 5870, but a full $120 cheaper. Two thumbs up for AMD!

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