Legit Reviews

At just $259 the ATI Radeon HD 5850 is ready to give any graphics card on the market a run for its money. Our readers that value good minded price versus performance products need to take a look at this mainstream video card to see if it is right for your next system build or upgrade.

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. With DirectX 11 game titles coming out soon a Radeon HD 5870 would be the better choice for gamers with monitors greater than 24" and screen resolutions in the 1920 x 1200 and beyond range...

Article Title: ATI Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire Video Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1097/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $259.99 MSRP

good read!

These are the cards I've been waiting for. The HD 5870 is slick and all but the HD 5850 is the price/performance king

Slick slick performance!

Clock the mem and core abit and rock on!

Nate, I only had time to skim the article this morning and didn't see it - do these support eyefinity?

FZ1 wrote:Nate, I only had time to skim the article this morning and didn't see it - do these support eyefinity?

yes, 3 displays

Wow, impressive performance for the buck!! NVidia has some price slashing to do, if they want to keep selling! Hats off, again, to ATi / AMD! Great review, as always!

Nate,

How come the last few reviews I've read don't use Crysis as a benchmark anymore? Is there something peculiar about Crysis that makes it unsuitable for benchmarking? To my understanding it's still a system killer.

Skippman wrote:Nate,

How come the last few reviews I've read don't use Crysis as a benchmark anymore? Is there something peculiar about Crysis that makes it unsuitable for benchmarking? To my understanding it's still a system killer.

Honestly just wanted to change to all new games when I moved to Windows 7...

Also are you talking Crysis or Crysis Warhead?

I am always open to suggestions and if you and others still make purchasing decisions using Crysis I can add it back in. That one is easy to benchmark anyway as it has a timedemo built-in... unlike many of the games I use here which require FRAPS.

Nice. Thanks for the review. My cards are outdated now. Thanks ATi. &

I want the 5850 but it is still a little pricey. I'm going to have to wait till it drops below $200. GT300 is rumored to be coming out december. I hope there will be a price drop then so I can retire my 4850.

Apoptosis wrote:

Skippman wrote:Nate,

How come the last few reviews I've read don't use Crysis as a benchmark anymore? Is there something peculiar about Crysis that makes it unsuitable for benchmarking? To my understanding it's still a system killer.

Honestly just wanted to change to all new games when I moved to Windows 7...

Also are you talking Crysis or Crysis Warhead?

I am always open to suggestions and if you and others still make purchasing decisions using Crysis I can add it back in. That one is easy to benchmark anyway as it has a timedemo built-in... unlike many of the games I use here which require FRAPS.

I would love to see some Crysis (not Warhead) numbers just to see if modern GPU's have managed to make this game playable. It wasn't but 6-7 months ago that Crysis was the demo of choice due to it's system crushing requirements. My thoughts are that if a card can tame Crysis then the cards have really shown an improvement.

When I look at benchmarks I often try to compare what I'm looking at now with what I'm currently running. Once ever 12-16 months my PC could be considered "state of the art" then it quickly falls by the wayside. It's difficult to try and compare a new card running a demo on a completely new game to one that's older and was benchmarked on the "flavor of the day" back then.

I trust the reviews I read here more than any other site I visit, be that Anand, Toms, or any other site. I do that for a number of reasons. You and the other editors are always open to questions, I truely feel like these forums encourage a community, and I know that I can count on you to always give your honest opinion.

I'm very strongly considering this or the 5870 for my next machine as opposed to buying 3 4890's and running them in Crossfire. If I knew either of these cards could actually make Crysis playable at 1920x1200 it would elimate any doubt in my mind as to their performance.

I think I might have to upgrade. This thing looks pretty cool.

Apoptosis wrote:

FZ1 wrote:Nate, I only had time to skim the article this morning and didn't see it - do these support eyefinity?

yes, 3 displays

It is easy to coordinate multiple displays in CF? I know with SLI, it can be a PITA.

Wow, I'm definitely impressed. Nvidia better have something awesome in the works (preeeetty sure they don't at the moment)

looks like AMD is putting out a very competitive midrange card. NVIDIA must come up with something taht can compete or it can be facing a very challenging market.

Im thinking I might pick up one of these instead of the 5870 and wait for the prices to fall and pick up another for crossfire.

Here is a huge question I have though: Can you test an AMD card on an triple AAA system? Meaning, Amd CPU, Amd Chipset (790x), and an AMD gpu? I would be curious to see the results from that.