The ATI Radeon 5850 graphics card – is the saving worth it?
By Wilson • Apr 13th, 2010 • Category: Buyer's Guide
- Photo: ATI
In releasing the very well received Radeon 5870, ATI created a problem for itself – it had made a special card that was simply too expensive for most people. As such, AMD released the cheaper Radeon 5850, which instead of solving their initial pricing problem created a new one by making the 5850 graphics card attractive enough that potential Radeon 5870 buyers may decide otherwise.
Who wants this?
- Photo: ATI
These Radeon graphics cards are aimed at PC gamers, clocking in very good performance for the most demanding games currently available. Various benchmarks have shown it holds up well across a wide range of games, but when pushed on Crysis, as with most cards on most rigs, the card began showing some of its limitations.
Specs
The ATI Radeon HD 5850 core clock runs at 725MHz, its memory clock runs at 1GHz, with 1440 stream processors, which is slightly less than the 1600 Radeon HD 5870 has. Where its identical to its 5870 big brother is in its 256-bit memory bus width, 1GB frame buffer, 2.15B transistor count and in its TSMC manufacturing process.
- Photo: ATI
What all of that means when put in action is that until recently, the ATI Radeon HD 5850 was the second best graphics card on the market behind only the 5870 and at a price cheaper than Nvidia’s then comparable GTX 295, which is a big deal for AMD and ATI.
To buy or not
Here’s the rub: these Radeon graphics cards are still rather pricey, at about £220 for the base configuration, and upwards of £250 for factory overclocked variations such as the cards retailed by Sapphire, so casual users stay away. When compared to the competition, though, the Radeon HD 5850 is about half the price of Nvidia’s admittedly more powerful TX 480, putting its capabilities and pricing in perspective.
For the budget conscious high-end gamer, this Radeon graphics card is a highly recommended alternative to the Radeon 5870.
Tags for this article: ati radeon, ATI Radeon 5850, ATI Radeon 5870, graphics card, Radeon 5850
