Written by Hanners  

Article Index
HIS Radeon HD 5850 1GB video card review
Radeon HD 5800 architecture
HIS Radeon HD 5850
Test setup, synthetic benchmarks
STALKER: Call of Pripyat, ET:QW
Left 4 Dead, Crysis
DiRT 2, HAWX
Far Cry 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum
Overclocking, video playback
Power, temperature, noise
Conclusions

HIS Radeon HD 5850 1GB video card review

While we've afforded plenty of time and coverage to AMD's Radeon HD 5870 graphics board of late (and indeed the Radeon HD 5970 more recently), there's one part of the company's DirectX 11 graphics board line-up that we've neglected almost entirely thus far.

The part in question is the Radeon HD 5850, which takes AMD's powerful Cypress GPU, trims it down via the chip's redundancy capabilities to reduce the number of active Stream Processors and texturing units, and thus offers a lower cost board for users hoping to pick up a high-end DirectX 11 part without breaking the bank.  Today, we take a look at HIS' reference-based Radeon HD 5850 board to see where it sits within AMD's Radeon HD 5000 series family, to decide whether it's worthy of consideration if you're in the market for a new graphics card in the run-up to Christmas.