We love this Radeon HD 5870's and that is a problem for ATI because we expect to feel that same kind of passion for the Radeon HD 5850. If we don't there will be heck to pay, heck we tell you. Today marks the day of our first Radeon HD 5850 landing in our hands. And the first company to make it out of the gates? Well, it was the same one that made it out of the Radeon HD 5870 gates, Sapphire. So, with a full retail version of the Radeon HD 5850 on hand we are going to see how the card goes against some other important models on the market. Now in these performance department we're expecting it to sit in between the Radeon HD 4890 and Radeon HD 5870. The main reason being because it has to. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB Graphics Card Review

Looking at the front of the package we can see it is not as big as the Radeon HD 5870 box that Sapphire had put together. This isn't uncommon as we tend to find only these highest model from Sapphire carries the larger box. Across the top of the box we have the Sapphire logo while to the right we see that the card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Moving down, we've got a picture of a girl and next to that we have the model, so in this case the Radeon HD 5850 as we mentioned before. And across the bottom we have the ATI logo along with some of the main features the card offers like DirectX 11, EyeFinity, CrossFireX and more.

Having an look at the video card now, you have to think at first sight that we have just put the Radeon HD 5870 before you. Head on the cards look almost identical with the major difference being that this one has Radeon HD 5850 showing on it. The only physical difference from head on which can't be noticed though, is that these Radeon HD 5850 comes in is slightly shorter size. We can of course see is that Sapphire has mixed it up in their own way with a sticker. Looking at the back of the card where we have our two little holes we can see like the Radeon HD 5870 this card carries with it two 6-Pin PCI Express connectors.

And after looking at the Radeon HD 5870 so many times we were feeling pretty confident that ATI were going to deliver with the Radeon HD 5850. The good news is they did. Really, like this Radeon HD 5870 we can see for the most part it's able to pull out a win against the GeForce GTX 285 which is NVIDIA's top single GPU graphics board. As for pricing, the Radeon HD 5850 manages to be pretty aggressive. Such GeForce GTX 285 sits around the $350 mark, while the Radeon HD 5870 is about $30 more expensive. The Radeon HD 5850 however, comes in at $260. This is simply sweet pricing represented excellent value for money.

It's disappointing that Sapphire didn't include the Dirt 2 coupon or at least another game like we saw in the Radeon HD 5870. With that said, leaving them out helps keep price down which increases the value for money and this is one area the graphics card stands out in. So we really can't wait to slap another one into our system to see what kind of performance CrossFire can offer with these Radeon HD 5850 graphics accelerators.