The Radeon HD 4870 1GB sure dropped to $150 pretty quickly, didn’t it? The Radeon HD 4890 really isn’t all that far behind at $190 (as low as $170 with mail-in rebates). So, for the Radeon HD 5850 to be a success at $259 $310, it’d better be appreciably quicker, right?
Nvidia has its own high-end bruisers around the same price range, too. A GeForce GTX 275 at $210 is mighty tasty. And a GTX 285—the company’s fastest single-GPU board available—isn’t bad at $330 or so given its single-GPU flagship status (less than $300, after some of those rebates).
If you haven’t yet checked out our review of the Radeon HD 5870, you might want to give it a quick peek. After all, the Radeon HD 5850 under our microscope today centers on the same fundamental architecture as that board (and I don’t think I can swing another 10,000 word story this week, so this piece isn't going to cover all of the GPU nuances).
Answering The Lynnfield Question
But that doesn’t mean we can’t break some new ground. One of the criticisms I saw come up in the comments section was that we used a $1,000 processor overclocked to 4 GHz for testing AMD’s Radeon HD 5870. Of course, that configuration was by design. These new GPUs are so powerful that we wanted to give them as much room to “breathe” as possible, without seeing congestion in the benchmarks due to processor bottlenecks. This presents a bit of a theoretical question to the folks running Core i7, LGA 1156-based Core i7s, a Core 2-series chip on P45, or 790GX. Mainly, does the move from a x16 PCI Express 2.0 slot to a x8 connection affect the performance of such a powerful GPU.
In order to help answer that, we took our Core i7-870 and overclocked it to 4 GHz on Asus P7P55D Premium. I suspect that in a Lynnfield-based configuration, the Radeon HD 5870 will be a less-popular choice than the cheaper Radeon HD 5850, so we tested a pair of 5850s on both Intel-based platforms to shed a little light on this one.
We also dropped the Core i7-870 to its stock speeds in order to isolate the effect of processor performance versus our overclocked Lynnfield-based results.
Is CrossFire Worth It?
When ATI launched the Radeon HD 4770 at $110, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to compare two of the cards together against Radeon HD 4890s and GeForce GTX 275s. But the Radeon HD 5850 is not a cheap piece of hardware at $259 $310. Due to availability issues, as of November 30th, a pair now costs $620. The only single card in that neighborhood is a GeForce GTX 295, which can be found for roughly $500 and hasn’t yet been discounted, despite AMD’s Cypress launch. To be fair, there isn’t yet a need, as the 5870s are still in extremely limited supply, so the challenge seems to be getting your hands on one.
But maybe the Radeon HD 5850 will change that. Today, we’ll be looking for a single Radeon HD 5850 to stand up to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285—a card AMD couldn’t contend with using a single-GPU solution in the past—and a pair of 5850s to at least eke past significantly best the GeForce GTX 295.
- Introduction
- The Makings Of Radeon HD 5850
- Hardware And Benchmark Setup
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
- Benchmark Results: Crysis
- Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2
- Benchmark Results: Left 4 Dead
- Benchmark Results: World In Conflict
- Benchmark Results: H.A.W.X.
- Benchmark Results: Resident Evil 5
- Benchmark Results: Grand Theft Auto IV
- Power Consumption And Noise
- The Lynnfield Element
- Conclusion

I hope you guys will go into more details about how you run your benchmarks for games. When I compare my own results, sometimes I wonder if you are using ingame FRAPS results, or a benchmark tool such as Crysis to get your results, this is very important for me to know. Please dedicated a small portion of reviews to let us know exactly what part of the game you benched, and in what fashion, it will be very helpful. Also, it would be great to see exactly what settings were used in games. For example you state that you set GTA4 to the 'highest' settings, however without 2GB of Vram, the texture settings can only be set on Med. unless you are compromising in the view distance category or somewhere else. So maybe a screenshot of the settings you used should be included, I would like to see this become regular in Tom's video card reviews. Great article, and please conisder by requests.
Yep I was looking at the Radeon 5850 especially CF'd for a build.
The Radeon 5870's seem a bit pricey to me so I'd prefer 2 5850's.
I can wait till they become available.
Thanks for the great review very impressive on those scores of the 5850.
I hope you guys will go into more details about how you run your benchmarks for games. When I compare my own results, sometimes I wonder if you are using ingame FRAPS results, or a benchmark tool such as Crysis to get your results, this is very important for me to know. Please dedicated a small portion of reviews to let us know exactly what part of the game you benched, and in what fashion, it will be very helpful. Also, it would be great to see exactly what settings were used in games. For example you state that you set GTA4 to the 'highest' settings, however without 2GB of Vram, the texture settings can only be set on Med. unless you are compromising in the view distance category or somewhere else. So maybe a screenshot of the settings you used should be included, I would like to see this become regular in Tom's video card reviews. Great article, and please conisder by requests.
Usually try to include them on a page in the review. Anything more detailed you'd like, feel free to let me know and I'm happy to oblige!
Specifically for this article, I would like to know how you benched Crysis. Did you use the in-game benchmark tool running a set number of runs, or with a FRAPS recorded sessions of say 15 minutes of gameplay ? I'd like to know, to compare specificly with my setup which is almost identical to your 5870CF setup used in this review, thanks.
For reference, I'm running a 4780 1 gig and the most "advanced" game I play is Fallout 3.
Anandtech did a review and the idle/load temps for the 5850 are 42/80. I think that can be improve quiet a bit with fan adjustments.
I think it's a good idea to wait a month or two and see what the 3rd parties offer for cooling. HIS and MSI 4850s with custom coolers that have STOCK idle/load temps of ~40/~60 vs 70/85 with reference coolers.
I am not rich, and I think I plan on getting 5850 and running 1440x900 for maybe 3 years (I played at 1920 res with Far Cry 2 and didn't see enough difference to warrant the higher requirements/money). I think I want to see more DX11 games and see how the first generation of cards perform before upgrading.