HIS RADEON HD5850 Review

Details:
Price: £215

Verdict:
AMD has struck the perfect price and performance balance. We love the HD5850 – it’s what high-end gaming is all about. 9/10

GPU: 725MHz
Stream processors: 1440
RAM: 1GB GDDR5
Memory clock: 4GHz (effective)
Memory bus: 256-bit
Connectivity: DVI x2, HDMI x1, Display Port x1
Web: HIS Digital

Moments after putting the finishing touches on our first HD5870 review we received its smaller sibling from HIS, the HD5850. Though the design and cooling mount appear almost identical at first glance, the card itself is shorter – with a total length of 9.5-inches. The only other major aesthetic difference between this and the HIS HD5870 is the position of the power connectors. The twin 75-watt six-pin connectors aren’t placed on the front edge of the card like they are on the HD5870, instead they’re on the very end of the card. This actually makes installation quite tricky since they’re hard to connect when the card’s fitted and there’s barely enough cable slack to do it when it’s not. Having the connectors on the end of the card also negates that extra inch or so saved on the card’s total length and could potentially cause problems for those of you with smaller cases. Assuming your hard drive is slotted directly level with the card, or your chassis leaves little room for manoeuvre, you might want to get a measuring stick out.

Beyond this reference design oversight, the HD5850 is a stunning piece of cutting-edge engineering. Besides a core clock speed of 725MHz and memory frequency of 4GHz (125MHz and 800MHz slower than the 5870 respectively) the only change under the hood is a slightly lower stream processor count, down to 1,440 from 1,600. Obviously, with a similar cooling mount in effect there’s definitely room for overclocking, but that’s something we’ll be exploring with the second-generation cards in coming issues. What’s important for now is how these new specs affect overall performance directly against the HD5870.

It clearly it drops off in places, but what’s interesting is in the areas the difference is most prominent (or in some cases, not). It’s the benchmarks running at 1200p (24-inch screen resolution running at 1920 x 1200) with AA and AF effects turned on that the performance difference between them is clearest. For example, in our Crysis Warhead Enthusiast test (using DX10, the highest settings and 4xFSAA) it ran approximately 6FPS slower than its bigger brother, with an average frame rate of 23.86. We wouldn’t usually be happy running an FPS at anything under an average FPS of 30FPS, so we’d obviously need to tweak some settings to get it as smooth as we’d like. Looking at the other end of the scale though with our lower-resolution GTA IV test, the results were almost identical – only one frame per second separates them. What this quick and dirty comparison clearly demonstrates is the extra expense in the HD5870 is only required if you’re gaming at very high resolutions. If you’ve got a 22-inch monitor or less then you’re going to get next to no benefit in many cases, making the HD5850 a much more sensible choice – even at the high end.
Russell Barnes