Radeon HD 5850 Reviewed

Smaller, cheaper and performs admirably.

The Radeon HD 5850 is an interesting card: it features all the capabilities of the big brother but a cut down memory bandwidth, TMUs and shader units. The card only has 1440 active shader cores, 72 TMUs and memory bandwidth is provided by slower 4GHz GDDR5 chips, vs 4.8GHz for the 5870. The lower specs aren't enough to slow down performance much but the card is considerably cheaper.

Anandtech's Ryan Smith has reviewed the card, performance in Crysis Warhead is more than ok:


I had already anticipated that the card would perform well, based on AMD's Radeon HD 5870 performance that was unveiled last week. The card does indeed live up to the hype, it can around 20% of the performance of the 5870 while costing $120 less, a more palatable $259. This also means that the newcomer is still able to take on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 pretty fiercely. DX11 support and Eyefinity is just icing on the cake.



Power consumption is surprising: 86w less than what the Radeon 5870 churs up, which is 160w officially, vs 188w on the 5870. This card is a more sensible one than the 5870 on all levels, even here.
Temperature on the GPU is also better, at 80ºC, 9ºC less than the 5870. Although still quite high, it's at more reasonable levels.

Conclusion

AMD's Radeon HD 5850 1 GiB is an excellent card by all measures: it features DX11 support, better performance than more expensive cards from Nvidia, triple monitor Eyefinity support, excellent power consumption and a decent price tag. If you overclock it, you'll probably be able to squeeze 5870 performance out of it. It really can't get any better than this right now, and one can only wonder what would've happened if AMD had cut ridiculous ratio of shaders/bandwidth(see 5870 reviews) and delivered a more balanced card for the same $199 as the previous generation. The only problem with the card is Linux support, in which case you should go green.
The ball is in Nvidia's court and it's a very hot one.