ATI Radeon HD 5850 now also put on the test bench

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The ATI Radeon HD 5850 offers a lot of value for money with its relatively modest price tag, according to the first tests of the new graphics card from AMD. The smaller brother of the HD 5870 is, however, only sparsely supplied to shops.

The arrival of the new generation of DirectX 11 video cards from AMD was heralded last week by the flagship product, the Radeon HD 5870. This card, with a price of more than three hundred euros, has 1600 streaming processors and 80 texture units, with the core is clocked at 850MHz and the memory is running at 1200MHz. The cheaper HD 5850 has 1440 stream processors, ten percent less than the HD 5870, and the number of texture units has also been reduced by ten percent to 72 pieces. The core runs at 725MHz and the memory has a clock speed of 1000MHz.

The differences are therefore relatively small and the price tag is about two hundred euros, about one hundred euros less than the HD 5870 costs. The benchmarks were therefore eagerly awaited. The HD 5850 is a mainstream card that should appeal to a wider audience than the HD 5870. However, the card turned out to be hardly available when it was introduced, so we had to wait for the first reviews. The HD 5850 benchmarks have now been published, including by hardOCP, HotHardware and PC Perspective.

As expected, the performance of the HD 5850 turns out to be slightly less than that of the HD 5870. However, the more expensive Geforce GTX285 from Nvidia and ATI’s own Radeon HD 4890 were still surpassed. As far as the power consumption is concerned, the HD 5850 is not much more economical than the HD 5870, but the energy hunger of the latter appears to be considerably greater under load. Incidentally, both the HD 5850 and the 5870, partly because they are built on the 40nm production process, are more economical than the competition.

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