When AMD launched the highly powerful ATI Radeon HD 5870 with support for DirectX 11, there was great excitement in the PC gaming world. Very quickly, the Radeon HD 5870 went on to become the top 3D performance graphics card. Not only was the performance of high-end games on this card impressive but the entire range of features, the exceptional image quality, competitive pricing and excellent power consumption quickly earned it a large fan following. Even at the time of release of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD had mentioned that they would be following this up with a slightly watered down version that would also be cheaper. However, no one anticipated that it would be launched so quickly or that it’s performance would match that of the Radeon HD 5870.
Radeon HD 5850 GPU is based on the same architecture as the Radeon HD 5870. However, some texture units and processor units have been reduced. What has not been touched has been the 32 ROPs found in the Radeon HD 5870 – this allows the Radeon HD 5850 to give the same kind of post processing and antialiasing performance as the 5870. The Radeon HD 5850 has 1440 streaming processor units (down from 1600 in the HD 5870). Compared to 80 texture units in the HD 5870, the HD 5850 has 72 texture units. The ROP count, as mentioned earlier, has not been touched and stays at 32. The clock speed of the Radeon HD 5870 is 850 MHz while that of the Radeon 5850 is 725 MHz. Both the CPUs have the same number of transistors, with the Radeon HD 5850 having a memory bandwidth of 128GB/sec. There is also a framebuffer of 1 GB, which should certainly help if games are being played at high resolutions with AA and CrossFireX enabled.
While the Radeon HD 5870 has a maximum power wattage of 188W, that of the Radeon HD 5850 is 151W. Further, the idle power remains the same at 27W so long as there is one display at 27W. The moment there are two displays (supported by the card), the idle wattage doubles. Radeon HD 5850 fully supports CrossFireX. While only one CrossFireX bridge connector should suffice for the HD 5850, if you would like a more stable experience with high-end games, particularly while running them at high resolution with AA, two bridge connections might just help.
In keeping with the popularity of the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, it is not difficult to believe that the ATI Radeon HD 5850 is also going to be a fairly popular graphics card especially among hardware lovers and gaming enthusiasts. Further, at around R3, 000, it is highly competitive and for the performance it delivers as well as the other features it packs, the Radeon HD 5850 has almost no close contender.
If you are interested in top quality gaming PCs, you should certainly take a look at the amazing range of AMD ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series DX11 Gaming PCs. We offers some of the most powerful, yet low-cost gaming PCs in the market today.
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