AMD has done it again. After delivering an amazing product in the HD 5870 last week, this week they rolled out an even better one in HD 5850. While the card does offer about 15% less performance, it is also 40% cheaper. This makes it the most attractive deal on the market right now, if you are looking for high-performance gaming. Sure, there are cards with way better price/performance ratios out there, but they only offer about half the performance of this baby. The HIS HD 5850 easily delivers enough performance for all games at all resolutions, except 2560x1600 maybe.
Power consumption numbers are even more impressive than on the HD 5870. Essentially the card delivers twice the performance at the same power consumption as the HD 4850. Such a low power consumption allows much improved acoustics as well. The card is quiet in both idle and load, definitely the quietest high-performance card available at the moment. If you are into overclocking, then this card is also for you. Thanks to using the same fast memory chips as the ones on the HD 5870, it can reach similar memory overclocks in the 1250 MHz range. A Volterra voltage controller is present for the GPU voltage, enabling software voltage control. With 1.3V VGPU I managed to reach 1000 MHz GPU clock on my card, which overclocks to 830 MHz without voltage increase.
HIS did a great job with their HD 5850. The accessory package feels complete, the DIRT 2 coupon especially is a nice touch, since it offsets the price of the product some more. I have to admit it is quite hard to find something wrong with this product. The only real demerit I can see is that availability of the HD 5850 is quite limited at the moment.