Having just recently looked at these Radeon HD 5870 and bearing witness to its power, we were keen to get our hands on the cheaper, cutdown version known as the Radeon HD 5850. Though both boards were announced last September 23rd, AMD waited an extra week until the Radeon HD 5850 could be showcased. And now we have finally dug up a production model from HIS to run our benchmarks. This more affordable Radeon HD 5850 shares the same technological advances as its higher end sibling. And that includes support for DirectX 11, Eyefinity and supersample anti-aliasing. That means a rather slightly toned down configuration, however allowing it to sell for just $260, which is just awesome. - TechSpot

HIS Radeon HD 5850 1GB Video Card Version Review

Now there is just one problem with the new Radeon HD 5800 series and it is not performance, nor value or efficiency. Ironically the problem is availability for which AMD is really shooting itself in the foot. In the past AMD has been forced to just drastically cut the price of their latest GPU's and sacrifice its margins in order to remain competitive with NVIDIA on the market. That was the case with both the Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 4870 cards. Today the new Radeons are facing virtually no competition, at least for now and yet AMD has seemed unable to fully capitalize on such advantageous head start, and regaining some market share.

And as an early production model this Radeon HD 5850 is not your typical highly modified HIS graphics card. So rather, it closely follows the reference design and specifications, with pretty much the only difference being a HIS sticker on the fan shroud. The package bundle HIS has prepared for their Radeon HD 5850 however is more generous than we come to expect from graphics card manufacturers as of late. The use of a 40nm design has allowed ATI to be quite aggressive with the core speed, clocking it at 725MHz which is a 125MHz reduction when comparing to its bigger brother which is the current king of the hill so to speak.

It's crystal clear by now that AMD has managed to deliver the fastest and second fastest single GPU graphics cards money can buy over the past month. At $260, it doesn't take a great deal of cash to get your hands on a Radeon HD 5850, and the performance you will get is nothing short of amazing. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be a NVIDIA counterpart around the corner, giving these newly Radeon series launch an extra edge. The more affordable HD 5850 also offers a few other advantages, including lower power consumption, reduced heat output and quieter operation, not to mention its size allows it to fit in any standard computer case.

The real kicker here is that this Radeon HD 5850 currently sells for considerably less than any GeForce GTX 285 card. Even if NVIDIA decided to cut prices in the near future, as we imagine they will, when you add the fact that the Radeon HD 5850 supports DirectX 11 and consumes considerably less power, the GeForce GTX 285 starts to become irrelevant. It is an interesting scenario that AMD had been unable to create for a while. We cannot wait to see how NVIDIA reacts. The company's next generation GeForce series is at best a few months away.