"Wie die Radeon HD 5870 lässt auch Atis HD 5850 ein klares Fazit zu: Die Spieleleistung liegt durchschnittlich minimal über dem Niveau von Nvidias Geforce GTX 285, welche momentan ab 270 Euro zu haben ist. Je nach Spiel ist die DX11-Radeon zwar einen Tick langsamer, dafür ist lässt sie die Geforce in einigen Titeln weit hinter sich."

"What AMD/ATI has accomplished with the Radeon HD 5850 GPU is the distillation of the range-topping goodness in an eminently sensible fashion, made possible by the use of a smaller PCB allied to widely-available 4GHz-rated GDDR5 memory.

Overall, then, the ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB sets a new performance and features standard at the £200 ($260) price point, and, taking value into account, we'd recommend most readers opt for one over the also-impressive HD 5870."

"So the bottom line is really simple: with the Radeon HD 5850 you gain a lot of features and will play your games at really good performance levels. There's very little to dislike here as not only do you have a state of the art graphics card in da house, you'll also have a very wide feature set available which is future proof. If your upgrade path is worth USD 259,- the Radeon HD 5850 comes very much recommended in our book."

"Well, there you have it. The Radeon HD 5850 manages to outshine the fastest single-GPU GeForce card overall while costing less, drawing less power, and producing less noise. We wouldn't be surprised to see Nvidia cut prices in the near future, but in any case, the 5850 is hands-down the second-fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market."

"The result of this is clear: the 5870 is the fastest single-GPU card, and the 5850 is the value alternative. Couple that with the fact that it’s cooler running, quieter, shorter, and less power hungry, and you have a very interesting card. Design-wise the 5850 lets AMD get Cypress in to slightly smaller cases that can’t fit full 10.5” cards, something NVIDIA was never able to capitalize on with the reference GTX design (we actually had several comments on this; apparently a good number of people can’t fit 10.5” cards). The 5870/5850 situation ends up closely mirroring the 4870/4850 situation as a result; the 5870 is still the card to get when price (and size) is no object, but the 5850 is there to fill the gap if you won’t miss some of the performance."

"For $259 the ATI Radeon HD 5850 smacks the competition then laughs. AMD has engineered this series smartly, doing what worked for it with the Radeon HD 4800 series. The Radeon HD 5850 uses the same GPU as the Radeon HD 5870 with some streaming processor units and texture units disabled with lower clock speeds. In our gaming experience, the 5850 performed appropriately compared to the Radeon HD 5870. AMD was smart in keeping the 32 ROPs intact on the Radeon HD 5850 and equipping the video card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. With this combination, dual-card 5850 CrossFireX performance is stellar. We were easily able to run at high resolutions with AA and high in-game settings."