Final thoughts
We surmised on the Radeon HD 5870 card's credentials in last week's review, and much of that in-depth analysis is pertinent to the DX11-compliant Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB card.The two high-end boards are seemingly analogous to the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, where the faster GPU offers more performance but at a considerably higher cost. The HEXUS.bang4buck shows that an extra 50 per cent outlay - £300 vs. £200 - isn't merited with a proportionate increase in performance for the Radeon HD 5870.
Indeed, absolute performance of the Radeon HD 5850 is the best of any ~£200 graphics card, beating out the Radeon HD 4890 OC and GeForce GTX 275, handily so, at higher resolutions. Got budget? Stick two in for dual-card CrossFireX.
The card's smaller dimensions mean that it's suitable for a greater array of chassis than the extra-long '70. Thermals and noise also continue to be good, and power-draw drops by almost 40W, opening up the way for the likes of Sapphire to design an in-house dual-GPU card.
What AMD/ATI has accomplished with the Radeon HD 5850 GPU is the distillation of the range-topping goodness in an eminently sensible fashion, made possible by the use of a smaller PCB allied to widely-available 4GHz-rated GDDR5 memory.
Overall, then, the ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB sets a new performance and features standard at the £200 ($260) price point, and, taking value into account, we'd recommend most readers opt for one over the also-impressive HD 5870.
ATI will complete with mid-to-high-end line-up with the Radeon HD 57xx GPUs, to be released soon. Should they come to pass before NVIDIA fires off its next-generation response, which seems likely, it will be hard to look past the 5-series for anyone interested in serious gaming together with a modicum of future-proofing.
HEXUS Rating
We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.
The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB is evaluated with respect to our 'high-end components' criteria.
HEXUS Awards
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB graphics cards can be ordered now from the following retailers:
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