ATI RADEON HD5850

Sapphire HD5850 Vapor-X 2gb

Specifications

Gpu Code Name	Cypress
Engine Clock	725 Mhz
Video Memory	1gb
Memory Clock	1000 Mhz ddr5
Memory Data Rate	4.0 GBps
Memory Interface	256-bit
Memory bandwidth	128 GB/sec
Compute Performance	2.09 TeraFLOPS
Texture units	72
DirectX	11
Bus Interface	PCIE 2.1 x16
Shader Model	5.0
DVI	Yes, Max.Resolution-2560x1600
VGA	Yes, Max.Resolution-2048x1536
HDMI	Yes( V 1.3), Max.Resolution-1920x1200
Display-Port	Yes, Max.Resolution-2560x1600
Hdcp Support	Yes
Ati Eyefinity	Yes up to 3 displays
CrossfireX Support	Yes, Hardware crossfire ( Up to 4-way)
Maximum board power	151 watts ,Requires two 6- pin power connectors (Min. power supply of 500 Watts required)

XFX RADEON HD5850

MSI HD5850 CYCLONE

SAPPHIRE RADEON 5850

Features

● 2.15 billion 40nm Transistors

● Terascale 2 unified processing architecture with 32 rop units

● GDDR5 memory interface

● PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface

● DirectX 11 support

● OpenGL 3.2 support

● Image quality Enhancement Technology(up to 24xAA and 16xAF)

● Ati Eyefinity multi-display technology

● Ati stream acceleration technology (OpenCL support and accelerated video encoding, transcoding and upscaling)

● Support for dual, triple and quad crossfirex

● ATI Avivo HD video and display technology

● ATI powerplay power management technology

● Certified drivers for Windows 7, Vista and XP.

Verdict

Overall the Ati 5850 is a winner card when you see mid high range gaming. You don’t need more horsepower than a 5850 to game at a resolution of 1680x1050 or even 1920x1200. It scales wonderfully when crossfired too, which should suffice those who game at resolutions of 2560x1600 or more. In terms of performance a single 5850 is equal to two 5750’s crossfired. It is a wonderful overclocker as it easily gets to 1ghz mark on the core and 1.2ghz on memory. Those are wonderful clocks because you get about 25% more performance without investingany more moolah. It performs very close to a 5870 when overclocked. And the crossfire performance of two 5850’s in any game or benchmark test is very close or even equal to a stock 5970 and beats a stock 5970 when overclocked.
This is very interesting because two 5850’s cost less than a 5970. So if you were planning to buy a single 5970 which is very hard to get a hand on nowadays, you might want to go for 5850 crossfire.

Throw in a decent quad core processor like Amd 965 black edition or Intel core i5 760 processor with 4gb of 1600mhz ram and you don’t need to worry for another two to three years. With most of the pc games nowadays optimised for the consoles (which is very bad for pc gaming), it should handle any game for that span of time unless some more titles like metro 2033 come out which are just ignored by the publisher without optimising. This card hovers around 40 and 70 degrees under idle and load conditions respectively with 40% fan speed. The temperature can be lowered by increasing the fan speed but it can be a bit loud for some people. It idles in sub 30 watts and eats 151 watts on full load which is surprisingly low when compared to its smaller brother, the ATI 5830 (175 watts under full load). Not to mention its interesting features like eyefinity and direct computing. It support  dx 11, shader model 5.0 and has 72 texture units similar to its big brother, the 5870. It costs about $240 and is a very good buy as per the bang for buck theory.

POWERCOLOR HD5850 AND POWERCOLOR PCS+ EDITION

MSI HD5850 TWINFROZR II

Pros

● Overclocks well

● Good price to performance ratio

● Lots of horsepower

● Cooler is quite

● Dx 11 and Eyefinity

● Three years warranty

Cons

● None

NOTE: The specs and features mentioned above may vary according to different manufacturer’s models.