Introduction

Last week AMD released their new HD 5800 Series. While the HD 5870 was a great hit, the HD 5850 was nowhere to be seen, except in our HD 5870 review where we simulated its performance.

Today we present you our review of the HIS 5850. The HD 5850 is based on the same Cypress GPU like the HD 5870, it has the same GDDR5 memory and supports all the features its bigger brother has. The only spec differences are a reduced shader count of 1440 (minus 10%), reduced clocks of 725 MHz core (-15%) and 1000 MHz memory (-17%). As a result the card is roughly 15% slower than the HD 5870, but costs over 40% less, making it an ideal candidate for the price/performance aware user.

The HIS HD 5850 follows the AMD reference design specifications to the letter, and simply adds the included accessories and the sticker on the cooler.